One AI bot signed up for 20 fediverse accounts in seconds, at a cost of pennies for its operator.

[jaz@toot.wales]

@ForgottenHero We can't even keep up with human spam. Of the 1800 or so known accounts created by paid Russian contractors to flood the fediverse with pro-Russian spam, the fediverse has collectively mitigated about 63% of those accounts.

Tens of thousands of posts.

Add bots to the mix and the network is cooked. "But no-one will ever see it" does not remove the cost to host the accounts, their content, and the moderation time to respond to reports.

https://about.iftas.org/2025/10/05/coordinated-pro-russian-propaganda-network-targeting-activitypub-and-atproto-services/

[deepbluev7@nheko.io]

@jaz@toot.wales We will likely need some reputation system, where completely random users get a limited experience for some time, but you might be able to bootstrap trust from other users. I don't like how that makes the experience worse for honest people though ._.

[forgottenhero@toot.wales]

@jaz

Twas me that reported AndyAgent to you, and I was impressed with the sped at which it disappeared.
Do you need more mods?

[jaz@toot.wales]

@ForgottenHero Thank you for reporting! We are always interested in hearing from people who would like to volunteer to help the community team, moderator applications are at https://forms.gle/TKj3vUpVs48YLj669

[eldadoinquieto@mastorol.es]

@jaz Hello, the blog post about this you linked it's not available.

Do you know if there is a copy somewhere?

[astrovore@gts.vidja.club]

@jaz what do you think of the invitation tree model as used by Lobsters? https://lobste.rs/about#invitations

I've always thought of that as being a great way to include trust from the ground up but I've not seen it used much.

[jaz@toot.wales]

@astrovore that can work for some communities, but some social web platforms are far more web-hosty-join-and-get-started kind of places

[jaz@toot.wales]

@eldadoinquieto Gone. Like tears in rain.

[eldadoinquieto@mastorol.es]

@jaz OK, thank you (I know the reference 😁).

https://media3.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExdHljcm1lbnUxemx6d2Jtem5yb3VxbDBmYWFiNGpyOTlqdmJ0N3djbiZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/JQMRbRkXuABUAUCH3A/giphy.gif

[jaz@toot.wales]

@eldadoinquieto I suppose you could ask the bot to repost the blog article...

Search for andyagent (I think there's a friendica account still working)

I could email it too, as it helpfully emailed me a couple of times when it hit its rate limits on toot.wales 😖

[eldadoinquieto@mastorol.es]

@jaz Better not, in fact a Fediblock call should be invoked.

[ada@blahaj.zone]

@jaz@toot.wales It tried to sign up on our lemmy instance, but I rejected it. Interestingly, it doesn't mention that on its instance dashboard