@nyanide @yonle @sakurajima ok, let me tell you about the last wave then.
Back then the main goal was to piss of fedi against some other people. So the first version of their bot looked exactly like this, a bunch of people tagged, a bunch of hashtags, a bunch of links, a bunch of freshly created accounts on multiple instances.
Now what happens if you still wana piss of fedi even if they try to restrict federation with some arbitary policies? You sure try to work around them...
HellThreadPolicy: Just tag less people
KeywordPolicy: just write random text or obfuscate it
AntiLinkSpamPolicy: just use different links, domains and services
There is simply no better way than to reject posts of new accounts for a specific time. It doesnt hurt existing users/friendships at all and either the account is spam so admins will most lilely delete them and fix their instanceor you will start receiving posts from new users after the specified amount of time passed. Nobody is harmed, excepting that posts of new users got "delayed" for some time...
Let me tell you this: if you wana piss of a big amount of people, fedi servers and its protocol is the best target to do so and you almost cant do anything about it