I’ve been using Mastodon for a couple years now. It’s been a great experience so far: cool people, interesting perspectives, and ad-free! Right?

Lately, I’ve noticed a massive uptick in spam, generally stemming from the larger instances in the fediverse. Nobody seems to be talking too much about this though. This spam is usually commercial or corporate accounts promoting their product, service, website, blog post/SEO marketing bullshit. It’s rather annoying and seems to goes against what Mastodon was supposedly founded on. I tend to browse by hashtags, but this feature is practically unusable on some hashtags, primarily because it has been transformed into infinite feeds of straight-up ads.

On the joinmastodon.org website, they tout, front-and-center:

Your home feed should be filled with what matters to you most, not what a corporation thinks you should see.

and

No […] ads to waste your time

As of today, these claims are essentially false. It seems now, every marketing team thinks I should be reading their AI-generated garbage articles, giving clicks to their products or affiliate links, or otherwise buying their services. And I’m wasting my time sifting through these feeds just to find posts written by actual humans.

Where’s the spam coming from?

If you take a quick glance at the live feed of mastodon.social, it’s clearly littered with ads, moreso than my e-mail’s spam folder. Sure, they’re not ads generating revenue for the instances nor Mastodon itself—but they’re still advertisements by companies wanting in on those fedi users. With a cursory glance of about 25 posts on that live feed, I counted 10-12 obvious ads and 3-4 automated posts (probably also ads). These are companies that are clearly looking to promote their website or service, and even sometimes directly linking to products for sale. There doesn’t seem to be a way to curtail this, aside from muting or blocking each of these seemingly-infinite accounts.

Moderation here is not necessarily the solution here either. Although some instances (like Hachyderm) will prevent companies from creating accounts, other instances do allow this. And sometimes, it’s not so clear-cut whether, for example, an AI-generated SEO-keyword-crammed blog post is truly considered spam. The rules of some instances might strictly define spam as companies selling products, whereas others may not.

Nor is server selection nor defederation a solution. Yes, users can choose which server to use and users can pick an instance that may have stringent spam policies. Yes, your instance can defederate from a spammy instance. Yes, you can simply block the offending instance. But this will also block legitimate, non-corporate users. I still want to view the posts of actual people. I just don’t want Mastodon to devolve into my e-mail’s spam folder.

A possible solution: marking commercial accounts

One possible solution is to mark commercial users as commercial users, similar to how Mastodon currently marks automated accounts. Corporate users would be required to self-identify their accounts as commercial and other users can decide whether or not to see their posts in their feeds. The ActivityPub spec already enables this via the type attribute in Actor objects. Users can be marked as a person, organization, group, or a service (bot). But as of today, this organization type and filters have yet to be implemented in Mastodon.

In 2022, user ocdtrekkie already proposed this change, although it doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere. I recently proposed adding filters for bot accounts but I won’t hold my breath that this will go anywhere.

I’m hoping that sometime soon, Mastodon will have these features to reduce the amount of spam in feeds. But until then, I guess I’ll just have to live with blocking an endless supply of spam and/or blocking some of these larger, spammy instances.

Take action

If you’re also tired of the recent spam on Mastodon, I would encourage you to take action by 👍-ing or showing support for these Github issues:

And talk about it on Mastodon! These features are currently not yet on the Mastodon roadmap, so attention must be given to these problems before the spam completely consumes the fediverse.