Notices by IFTAS (iftas@mastodon.iftas.org)

@evan this is what prompted the creation of the Abandoned / Unmonitored Domain denylist, so yes, IFTAS believes it would help tremendously.

Specific account denylists could also be created, this is not something IFTAS plans on taking on.

https://about.iftas.org/library/iftas-abandoned-and-unmanaged-domain-list/

IFTAS has now observed and reported over 4,000 inauthentic accounts created by the Portal Kombat/Matryoshka disinfo #FIMI team. This number is just the accounts manually observed and verified by humans.

Could be there's twice as many, ten times as many, who knows?

Each account spews non-stop automated slopaganda and inauthentic boosts.

Roughly 65% of our reports are acted on.

In other words, huge volumes of unchecked spam federating around the web.

Learn more: https://about.iftas.org/library/suspected-portal-kombat-accounts/

Let's see what platforms are responding to this year's Social Web survey, the annual questionnaire to see how #FediAdmin and #FediMod folks are doing:

#Mastodon 54
#Matrix 17
#PeerTube 15
#WordPress 10
#Pixelfed 9
#ATProto platform 8
#Lemmy 8
#Pleroma 8
#Bookwyrm 6
#GoToSocial 5
#Bonfire 4
#Gancio 4
#Sharkey 4
#Writefreely 4
#Akkoma 3
#Friendica 3
#Ghost 3
#Mobilizon 3
#Nostr platform 3
#Funkwhale 2
#Hometown 2
#Misskey 2
#NodeBB 2
#Hubzilla 1

@evan Evan, this is great news, glad the lists are of help. Are you OK with me listing them as used by tags.pub on their home pages?

https://about.iftas.org/library/iftas-abandoned-and-unmanaged-domain-list/

https://about.iftas.org/library/iftas-dni-list/

And if you're not auto-updating from source, the #SW_ISAC_ADVISORY tag will let you know when the lists are updated

@Bonfire The network grows and we've tripled the number of federating services in the past 12 months.

Opt-in or selective federation is the only way forward for many communities. No-one can individually vet and monitor 58,000 domains.

Kudos to @Bonfire for getting this stable and ready for production!

We're seeing a lot of account takeovers of old, unused accounts. If your account has elevated privileges (eg admin or moderator access) we strongly advise you enable multi-factor authentication.

Please boost for visibility.

#FediAdmin #FediMods #MastoAdmin

⚠️ #SW_ISAC_ADVISORY

The following domains have been added to the IFTAS Abandoned/Unmanaged Domain denylist with a "Silence" (aka "Limit") recommendation:

mastodon.lithium03.info
zirk.us

https://about.iftas.org/library/iftas-abandoned-and-unmanaged-domain-list/

#Spam #CIB #FIMI

Example accounts have been updated:

https://social.roadfm.fr/@akusa
https://social.roadfm.fr/@anyrum
https://social.roadfm.fr/@effiebryant
https://mastodon.lithium03.info/@carolynpalmer
https://mastodon.lithium03.info/@czm2spy
https://mastodon.lithium03.info/@emily-gordon
https://electroverse.tech/@concepcion_thiel
https://electroverse.tech/@jocelynsullivan
https://electroverse.tech/@ugiz
https://todon.ploud.fr/@bryanadavies
https://todon.ploud.fr/@duwa_ury
https://todon.ploud.fr/@ezomo
https://gs.leftic.club/@aji_roti
https://gs.leftic.club/@Okem_Gecyj
https://gs.leftic.club/@VioletQuinn

#FediAdmin #MastoAdmin #FIMI #Disinformation #Spam

@lwflouisa not particularly. There are over 170 domains with observations, and they include a wide range of supported languages, and the bots are posting in those languages on many of those domains. German, Spanish, English, all as well-represented. The Japanese cluster seems to be a little bit driven by Japanese freedom of speech approaches and a little bit a lot of home-hosted smaller instances with very old software versions.

A massive, heartfelt thank you to the first 20 people who jumped in to support the Power of One campaign 💙

Running IFTAS infrastructure can feel like a massive mountain to climb alone, but seeing the community show up with their spare change to help cover our bills means everything. We are building a secure baseline, one supporter at a time.

Stand with our first 20: https://givebutter.com/iftas-power-of-one

https://givebutter.com/iftas-power-of-one

The Russian botnet has now created over 2,500 inauthentic accounts on 180 Mastodon servers. These accounts spam propaganda, follow each other to increase federation, connect to Bluesky via the bridge to spread their content there, and create unlimited invite links for their bots to follow.

IFTAS reports each one we find, and to date roughly 60% of these accounts have been suspended.

Our AUD denylist would silence or suspend the bulk of the remaining 40% of accounts.

https://about.iftas.org/library/suspected-portal-kombat-accounts/

If you value this work and want to see our safety resources stay online, independent, and active, please consider joining our Power of One campaign.

We are looking for 500 supporters to contribute just 1 (£, €, $) a month. Small change, big difference.

Support IFTAS here: https://givebutter.com/iftas-power-of-one

⚠️ #SW_ISAC_ADVISORY

The following domain(s) are entering the IFTAS Abandoned/Unmanaged Domain (AUD) review process:

mstdn.at
paxation.info
sigmoid.social
zirk.us

These nodes are open registration, are being used by coordinated botnets, and are unresponsive to reports, DMs, and Email communications.

If you have contacts at any of these services, please reach out and let them know we have been trying to contact them for three weeks.

#Spam #FIMI #CIB

https://about.iftas.org/library/iftas-abandoned-and-unmanaged-domain-list/

5. (p63) "A comment by B1 on A1’s post will be visible by all B users, and A users but not by C users."

This references a 2023 web page, and was significantly ameliorated by version 4.4 of Mastodon as of July 2025.

Even prior to that, the correct statement would have been "A comment by B1 on A1’s post will be visible by all B users, and A users but IN SOME CASES (emphasis mine) not by C users."

cont'd

Meta in fact already interoperates with ActivityPub via its Threads product, and as such has classified content from thousands of interoperating ActivityPub-based OSNs, and reflected their findings (and therefore, trust) in the form of a list of servers they choose not to interoperate with based on the OSNs' content (https://www.threads.com/moderated_servers).

cont'd

4. (p36) "From an organisational perspective, establishing interoperability with a P2P
network for Facebook would involve either: ● Establishing trust relationship with as many users as there are servers. ● Establishing trust relationship with a gateway provider"

cont'd

3. (p36) "The only known attempt to realise such interoperability relies on the latter approach (i.e. bridge attempts between the Nostr decentralised OSN and the ActivityPub Fediverse)"

The Bridgy Fed bridge that interoperates ActivityPub and AT Protocol operated by A New Social @anewsocial currently serves 150k users.

cont'd

(The section completely ignores the fact that as of April 2025 there were roughly 17M registered accounts on the Fediverse.)

cont'd

2. (p23) "while the majority of other Mastodon servers serve only tens of users"

This (a) links to a non-existent source and (b) ignores that there's 10,000 such servers, which IMO specifically demonstrates the intent of consumers to use interoperable OSNs themselves (self-hosting their own network node).

Further - as the attached image shows, while there is a long tail of smaller OSNs operating on ActivityPub, a broad range of community sizes exists and is thriving.

cont'd

1.(p23) "The largest Mastodon instance, mastodon.social, reported 289K registered users as of June 2025"

This cites a conservative monthly active users metric, not total accounts, which was 2.6M at the time and has grown to over 10M today.

cont'd