I’ve been noticing an influx of users with anonomized usernames (ie: fjdasklfpudiosa722104891fdaf20j.srv.us).
As a moderator this concerns me because it immediately triggers a ‘this is a bot or nefarious actor’ instinct. Is there any reason not to be wary of these accounts?
I’ve been using Fedi for a long time and from the very beginning I’ve been afraid of spam and bots ruining it, at least temporarily. Spam is still a problem with e-mail, and it’s been around for 40 years and they’ve developed very sophisticated anti-spam mitigations for it.
The problem is that most of the ‘spam’ comes from official things like websites that you’ve signed up to and didn’t realise would also include dumb fkn emails periodically. And they don’t always do it right away either. I’ve had emails suddenly start arriving from somewhere that I signed up to like a year before.
Personally, my spam mitigation is to have one email address for signing up to shit with. Then these assholes can email me until they’re blue in the face and I don’t care because the only time I ever visit that inbox is for verification. And then I have another email address for personal use that never gets used because who uses email for personal use these days?
In conclusion. Email is for signing up to things and collecting trash that I’ll never look at.
That’s probably just mail that lands in your spam folder without being entirely blocked. According to Microsoft and Google approximately 99% of incoming spam (of the ~160 billion spam emails sent per day) never even reaches their users mailboxes. I assume that’s roughly standard across email providers. I am concerned comparably sophisticated filtering may become necessary on the Fediverse eventually.
I get the concern but I don’t think you need to be as concerned as with email. Email is a lot simpler without a lot of validation. On the fediverse, HTTP Signatures are used to verify requests, so you can’t spoof stuff as easily.
That said, spam mitigation will probably still be an issue that continuously needs to be dealt with.
I, for the life of me, couldn’t stop nextdoor from emailing me. I could unsubscribe myself from one category of email and they’ll start popping up again. Just had to block it on my end.
IMHO messages from things you’ve signed up to are unlikely to be “spam”. I’ve always understood that word to mainly mean completely unsolicited messages from people you have no previous relationship with at all; though if it’s clearly unwanted it might include some of the former too.
A ton of things I have signed up for spam me with trash emails that they don’t put in the ‘sales’ or ‘offers’ categories I unchecked. Just because I was forced to create an account to buy one thing doesn’t mean I have a ‘business relatiotionship’ that justifies multiple daily reminders of what they have in stock.