Notices by Admin Jerry (admin@hear-me.social)

With the announcement that lemm.ee, I believe the 2nd largest #Lemmy instance, is shutting down in a few weeks, some of their more active users have moved to my #PieFed server (feddit.online). Tonight I need to double the memory on the app server. And the DB server that was idling at 23% CPU until this morning is now 100% since late morning. I need to maybe scale it up as well.

I know piefed.social scaled up yesterday, and they've been much harder hit than I have. I wonder how other #Lemmy and #MBIN servers are being impacted by this. Anyone know?

Good time to point out that, unlike #BlueSky, none of my 9 public social networking sites are providing user surveillance information to ICE or any other U.S. government agency.

There are over 200 huge sites telling the U.S. government what you are doing, and where you are doing it from.

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns/no-data-for-surveillance-tech/

#Mozilla #Tracking #Privacy #surveillance

All. I blocked social.beaware.live, not because the Admin is a problem, just the opposite, I love the guy. But because he stopped self-hosting, and I was seeing errors in the logs because it is no longer reachable.

There are some followers here who will be notified of the suspension, so just know, you can find him instead at @BeAware and if you haven't started following him at his new home, you should.

Riddle me this. How can a spammer start their account creation from /auth/confirmation? He does this every week. He never accesses /auth/sign_up. He always first shows up in the logs accessing /auth/confirmation.

I have his ASN blocked by the Cloudflare firewall from accessing /auth/sign_up. I see in the Cloudflare logs that he tried to access /auth/sign_up but got a 403 from Cloudflare. The request is nowhere in my logs. It was truly blocked by the proxy server.

But, then suddenly he's using /auth/confirmation with the same blocked ASN seconds later and creates the account. Today I added the same ASN restriction to /auth/confirmation to try to stop future sign-ups, but this is beside the point.

It's like he tries to go to sign_up, gets a 403, and then uses some alternative means to begin the signup process.

He's not getting in with an invitation code, either.

Can he be using an existing account in some way to get an access token for an API call of some type to begin registration?

How does he do this?

#MastoAdmin #MastoDev @Gargron @ClearlyClaire

Last night, I suspended an account, 27 minutes after it was created, for claiming to be E lon M usk. It had the whole scammer M.O. It immediately began following a bunch of people, hoping to hit on someone who would believe it was the real person contacting them.

I read about people losing huge sums of money to these scams.

This is the 4th famous-person impersonation account I've removed since starting this Mastodon server. The first time, they did hit someone on Mastodon who believed the account was official and who started engaging. I reached out to that person after suspending the offender to tell them the account they responded to was fake.

For those who need to hear this, please be careful. No famous person is going to reach out to you on Mastodon, or any other social media.

#Scam #Mastodon

@mastodonmigration This is one reason I don't like Bluesky. The other is that everyone I block is public information, and everyone who has blocked me is also public information. Blocks should be private.

I just built and deployed the latest #Phanpy version to https://phanpy.hear-me.social.

If you haven't tried Phanpy, you ought to. It is a superior UI for Mastodon and other Fediverse applications.

@cheeaun #Fediverse

@NicholasTheSaver I looked at some posts on shortstacksran, just a sampling, and I didn't see racism. I did see posts that, I thought, were inappropriate and walk the line, for reasons other than racism. I limited the server to keep their posts off the public timeline and prevent boosting. People are still free to create follow relationships (none here, anyway). If you see a racist post that the Admin won't act on, open a report.

It seems all the accounts I sampled are owned by low IQ people. But, unless I see evidence that the admin allows racism or allows the breaking of serious rules, I won't block them. I need strong proof before I block another server.

As for servers involved in AI because they might steal something, all servers, because they have people behind their accounts, might steal something. There's no rule here against servers that focus on AI if that's what they focus on. I didn't check anything on the server. And I am not against AI. I don't believe AI=evil.

I've decided to block linuxrocks.online after all. This conversation did it for me:

Q: Does your server welcome people who believe LGBT people don't deserve the same rights as non-LGBT people?

Do they also welcome people who believe that Jews don't deserve the same rights as non-Jews?

A: Yes, and Yes

In short order, bigots and hateful morons will be opening up accounts on linuxrocks.online as word gets out that they are welcome there.

The Admin hides under the "we allow unpopular opinions", but these are not opinions because they defy the evidence. They are just stupid statements that are meant to hurt people.

Jerry

@BeAware
I'm convinced.

This did it for me:

Q: Does your server welcome people who believe LGBT people don't deserve the same rights as non-LGBT people?

Do they also welcome people who believe that Jews don't deserve the same rights as non-Jews?

A: Yes, and Yes.

My answer is Never and Never.

This means bigots and creeps will be running to his instance now to set up their homes for hating. His claim about unpopular opinions is bullshit. Statements that oppose facts are not opinions, they are just stupid, dangerous, hateful speech.

I am going to block linuxrocks.online

I just built and deployed the latest #Phanpy version to phanpy.hear-me.social

Phanpy is a remarkable UI alternative to the Mastodon web UI. I highly recommend you try it if you haven't done so.

@cheeaun

@BeAware All this is absolutely true. The mass block lists have built in extortion against admins who won't follow orders from some larger instances.

Admins, do your own analysis and don't be dupes.

#Threads
#mastoadmin

Threads has JDPower.com on their Federated block list for not having a publicly accessible feed (https://www.threads.net/moderated_servers).

WTF is JDPower.com doing connected to the Fediverse network? They sell cars and rate companies. They are certainly not a social media site.

Are they reading and scraping messages? Looking for people interested in buying cars or something? I'm wondering if I should block them at the firewall.

#mastoadmin #spam

Does anyone know who is behind the bot that sends automated spam account reports from .social?

I think it's a great bot idea and a useful tool, and I'd like to follow them, provide feedback, report the typos in their message, and I'd like to know where to request a whitelisting if needed.

This is what I received in the report explanation

mastodon . social Today at 05:58

Automated spam report. We have seen this username on multiple onstances [sic] before.

If this was reported in error, please let me know so that I can put this account on the allowlist.

Damn spammers are really active today.

SO FAR today, I've suspended 8 new spam accounts. When they finally get deleted, each one will generate over 21,000 jobs in the "pull" queue (160,000+ jobs), which will be a burden on the server to process. Not happy about this. Why do they open these accounts? It's not the accounts will get picked up by search engines or anyone will see them. What are they expecting?

Do other smaller instances fight these all day too?

I manually delete these accounts late at night when the server is less busy.

UPDATE: Registering here as new users. I have hcaptcha enabled so it isn't bots.

#MastoAdmin #spammers

@Fratm
When I do https://mastodon.social/api/v1/instance I see the following limits on videos:

media_attachments
supported_mime_types
0 "image/jpeg"
1 "image/png"
2 "image/gif"
3 "image/heic"
4 "image/heif"
5 "image/webp"
6 "image/avif"
7 "video/webm"
8 "video/mp4"
9 "video/quicktime"
10 "video/ogg"
11 "audio/wave"
12 "audio/wav"
13 "audio/x-wav"
14 "audio/x-pn-wave"
15 "audio/vnd.wave"
16 "audio/ogg"
17 "audio/vorbis"
18 "audio/mpeg"
19 "audio/mp3"
20 "audio/webm"
21 "audio/flac"
22 "audio/aac"
23 "audio/m4a"
24 "audio/x-m4a"
25 "audio/mp4"
26 "audio/3gpp"
27 "video/x-ms-asf"
image_size_limit 16777216
image_matrix_limit 33177600
video_size_limit 103809024
video_frame_rate_limit 120
video_matrix_limit 8294400

As an Admin, I spend much of my time suspending accounts that are created to promote stupid stuff like this: "End the marriage with ease and without stress with ComeGetScammed.com. Our divorce papers online free service offers an easy and affordable way to get the divorce you need."

Sigh

Yes, I fixed the domain name when reposting.

#MastoAdmin #HearMeSocial

@BeAware

Thanks for the heads-up!

This account is suspending on this instance now.

Inspired by a Tim Chambers post (@tchambers), I've enabled the relay between us and Flipboard's Mastodon server (Flipboard.social) so that everything posted there will be available here, in parallel.

This should enhance search results as searches will now include all their content and all their active user accounts.

The information comes from https://flipboard.team/the-kitchen-sink/federating-with-flipboard-com

#flipboard #Admin #HearmeSocial #FediRelay

@GossiTheDog
I have the captcha enabled, but still woke up to 628 new spam accounts, thankfully, not yet confirmed.