I'll also note that I'm in a demographic that doesn't see targeted attacks so perhaps there's a problem with these I'm not aware of.

another example

recently there was a mini-campaign of coordinated harassment: reporting to mods and admins via # fediblock, targeting a well known ukrainian

what was interesting about this effort, to me personally, is that since i hunt vatnik accounts, and have had some success, the accounts doing this had preemptively blocked me when they made these harassment accounts

i found them searching while logged out

the mods have such headaches

In addition, it seems to me that there's at least one instance whose only purpose is hosting bot or troll accounts.

I was ignored, and here we are.

#CleanMastodon

one, directly from the source

two, from people who amplify

Fedi (the corners I'm in) has so far had very little of the latter because there's been so little of the former.

But bot accounts are sharply on the rise; now I get more bots than humans trying to follow me, when previously it was the reverse.

The landscape is changing and we'll have to adapt - I hope we beat the bad actor's pace with social-technical tools and improvements that let us collaboratively approach the problem literally more efficiently than they can pollute.

For example, this is what captchas used to do: they raised the cost and effort beyond the expected return, so doing more things that involved breaking captchas just lost money faster.

I remember when AOL did its "Eternal September" to the internet back in the 1990's. It is absolutely intentional to destroy existing communities and replace that structure with one they have brutal control.

#CombatArena #OpenMic

I sometimes have a problem with deciding whether some accounts have some sort of agenda or whether it's someone I just disagree with. I suppose everyone has the same problem, though