Notices by Mastodon.social Staff (staff@mastodon.social)

We plan to disable the "live feeds" of the local and federated timelines on mastodon.social within in the next couple of weeks. They are already disabled on mastodon.online. While these feeds can be useful on smaller, topical or regional servers, they have limited use on larger servers like ours.

The live feeds present all content on the server immediately and essentially pre-moderation, which presents a particularly poor experience to new users finding the fediverse for the first time.

We have seen a recent wave of impersonation accounts which claim to be another fediverse user, often with a similar username and boosting some posts from the original account, before reaching out to followers over private mentions and claiming to have issues with their original account.

Please report them if you see them!

mastodon.social has just handled it's 250,000th report! While we acknowledge that mastodon.social's size is too large a percentage of the fediverse (and have plans to address it), one benefit of being the fediverse's front door is that bad actors come to us first.

@HugeGameArtGD @eblu Bear in mind that generally our staff will take action on things like unsolicited mentions or DMs, but does not prohibit seeking assistance in general.

The Gaza-Verified.org verification has to be provided by Aral to that specific account, whereas the profiles pictured merely state they are verified by "GAZA VETTERS".

As a note, most of the accounts we've seen reported as "scammers" do indeed appear to be from Palestine, though we do not extensively vet accounts ourselves.

Today a new account using a handle that is against our rules got past the filter we use to automatically block rule-violating accounts. We apologize to the individuals who were harmed by this failure on our part. We believe in building a safe community here on Mastodon.Social, and stand by our commitment to Ban Nazis. We have banned the individual in question. We have updated our filter, and are conducting an in-depth review to make sure this will not happen again.

@aral These are pretty routine scammers we see targeting anyone asking for donations. Thank you for advising people not to engage with them.

We don't think this is particularly targeted towards Palestinians, the same scammers often target any fundraising campaigns or mutual aid, and often comes from the same sources as romance scams and Elon Musk giving away crypto accounts.

@aral @ubik @CadeJohnson @Aseelsehwel @NouranKhaledGh @divya Generally most of these accounts appear legitimate from our perspective, though we cannot vouch for any specific campaigns. Accounts we close generally use unsolicited mentions, follow bots, and create duplicate or ban-evading accounts.

@cainmark @nunesgh We have the staff role badge which can only be set by the server administrator, though the badge is only visible when you are viewing it from mastodon.social itself.

We're as frustrated as everyone else with these phishing attacks. mastodon.social had new sign-ups in approval mode this week to limit the impact, but offenders targeted other instances and compromised existing accounts. We take the problem very seriously; we're suspending and blocking as quickly as possible, as well as actively working on countermeasures.

Please report any account that claims that you need to verify your #Mastodon account to continue using it. It is a scam. Don't click the links. Real staff accounts either have a special role badge on their profile or are verified through the joinmastodon.org domain.

We are working on combating the current bot account waves. As they decide our measures are effective, they are likely to attempt attacks on other servers as well. Please be patient with the admin and moderation staff across the fediverse. Large server administrators looking for additional information are welcome to contact us by email at staff (at) mastodon.social.

Hey fedi! We're the team managing mastodon.social and mastodon.online! We provide assistance with user accounts and moderation appeals primarily by email at staff (at) mastodon.social. Please use the reporting system first whenever possible for the fastest response.