colin mitchell @muffinista@botsin.space

Hello! A bunch of people have asked for ways to support this instance. I am currently able to cover the expenses, so please do not worry about supporting if that's not an option for you! But if you'd like to help out, I've made two ways to do that.

First, I now have a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/muffinista

Second, you can Paypal me here: https://www.paypal.me/muffinista

ps i've put together a spreadsheet of server expenses here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15aiy_uWOYzXKqUAh_rBi8n2u2ikpUmKKYriZ1B2GNPo/edit#gid=0

Greetings! I'm going to take the server down in a little while to run some updates

hello to everyone signing up here to check out @SecretlyPublicDomain! if you like bots and/or art things, please say hello to the other bots here too

Also, just a heads up that the servers are getting hammered lately, and there is a backlog of signup requests. I'm working on both, sorry!

Hi folks, blocking freefedifollowers.ga because it's the spammiest spammer that ever did spam

So I've been processing account sign-ups and trying to be quick about it, and one thing I occasionally do is reject signups that don't fill out the "why do you want to join?" field. I'm suddenly realizing that this means I've been rejecting some legit signups that just happen to leave this field blank. So if you have a reason in mind, please out it there, and if you don't, it's okay to say that too! If it's blank, I have no idea at all what your intention might be. Thanks!

Hello from v2.9.4

PSA: I'm planning on running some updates to botsin.space tomorrow morning (ie ~24 hours from now)

Hi friends, I'm getting a weird error here, no idea if other people are getting it, and I'm travelling so debugging it is a little tricky! pls let me know if you are experiencing weird issues

I don't talk a lot about what servers are blocked on botsin.space, but FYI gab is blocked here and will continue to be blocked in whatever form it takes

OK, I've switched botsin.space to require approval for new signups. Sorry for any inconvenience! I got tired of deleting right-wing spam accounts.

When I upgraded botsin.space yesterday, I skipped from v2.8.2 to v2.8.4, and totally ignored the fact that there was a database migration in the v2.8.3 release, which basically means that any timelines that had images in them weren't loading properly. Sorry about that!

hello from mastodon v2.8.4?

I've blocked social.librem.one from this instance for now as it appears they've removed the ability to report users [1].

That seems like such a fundamental requirement of large scale federation that I can't really imagine dealing with an instance like that. If they eventually provide a reasonable explanation, or just fix the problem, I'll remove the block.

1) https://source.puri.sm/liberty/smilodon/commit/9cae431902a2c0ce6438c6722a3a901e279c78fc

mastodon 2.8.0?

hello from mastodon v2.8.0!

PSA: I will likely upgrade botsin.space to v2.8 tomorrow if I'm feeling brave.

also, new account signups are still turned off for a little while, i'll reactivate those tonight or tomorrow

i strongly suspect i'm fighting a losing battle here, the only question is who runs out of energy first, me or whoever is running this spam farm

for context, there have been around 250 accounts that signed up in the last month which i've suspended for spam. Something like 175 of those were in the last week. They've sent thousands of spam statuses out. I've slowly ramped up tools to prevent that until this point.

re: datacenters, i pulled a set of 40 unique ip address of spammers. i can identify 35 of them as being in a datacenter. blocking those is an easy choice at that point.

Hi all, I've added some code to botsin.space to help fight spam. the changes are:

1) prevent account signups from datacenters

2) prevent unsolicited statuses (in most cases) to users you don't follow

#1 is going to block many spam accounts, but is also probably going to be an issue for Tor users who want to create an account here. Sorry about that.

#2 should block a bunch of spam, and ideally you shouldn't be sending unsolicited messages anyway.