How does it deal with spam?
Mastodon has a couple of key advantages, though.
* First, if the spammer is coming from a "good" instance, the admin of that instance can ban them—and the number of instances means that there are more mods to go around. * Second, if the spammer is coming from a pure spam instance, other instances can ban/unfederate with the whole instance.
That said, it's an area that the community is focused on. Here's an issue discussing spam and additional tools that could help: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/8122
From the overview it seems like dedicated spam instances could be quickly spun up in the same way that email domains are?
I run an instance and the last 2-3 days I've been flooded with spam bots. Reading github issues and toot threads I've noticed it's a big issue and has been coming in waves on other instances this summer.
I like to draw parallels to e-mail because Mastodon's issues are very similar to the issues we had with email in the 90s.
So I've seen mastodon instance admins mention things like maintaining centralized blacklists. I've even seen people mention using spamassassin to train on mastodon toots instead of mails.
Sign-ups of spambots are likely automated yet reCaptcha is out of the question because Mastodon users tend to dislike big corporations like Google.
I hope VisualCaptcha is a viable option but we'll see.
Some claim that captcha is a waste of time altogether because they can be defeated but my opinion is that it would still protect against most less sophisticated bot networks.
Short answer; right now there is no real solution other than manually banning and adding server IPs to a 800+ strong list of banned IP subnets maintained on github. There is also the option of banning MX servers because the last wave of bot signups all used the same backend MX server. Even though they used a ton of e-mail domains.
And of course requiring confirmation of new accounts by admins.
I predict spam is going to be a very hot topic in the fediverse for a while still.
Mastodon is community driven, not backed by any one big corporation. Anything driven by the internet community is going to be wilder than a centralized solution. It will be the wild wild west of social media. There is no denying or escaping that fact.