RE: https://burnout.cafe/@admin/116857804772538444
#fediblock i recommend defederating burnout[.]cafe
fediblock
Hey @Gargron, your staff is destroying the social network you created.
I made #fediblock posts about Aral engaging in doxxing, with receipts, as well as racism. They removed these posts to protect their golden boy. They were mild critiques, supported by facts, with links, but they posed an unacceptable challenge to the ideology which predominates.
In like manner they protect his ridiculous #gazaverified spam initiative, which is destroying user experience, and causing Mastodon to die.
Quick heads-up for other Mastodon admins: this registration spam wave isn't over yet.
On lsbt.me, we first saw a flood of API registrations using Python/aiohttp. The telltale signs were usernames following the pattern bp plus 16 hex characters, and the sign-up reason was always "Automated protocol deliverability probe". A narrow block on that user agent stopped the first wave.
Today, however, five new registrations came in with the same usernames and the same sign-up reason. This time the bot simply identified itself as Chrome 126. That's exactly why a user agent is only useful as a short-term filter. It's a header the client can set to anything.
The requests go to POST /api/v1/accounts. This endpoint lets client apps create a new local account directly in the app. No app needs it for OAuth connections to existing accounts. #FediSuite doesn't use it either. It registers itself via /api/v1/apps, obtains consent via /oauth/authorize, and then works with a user token. Regular sign-up through the Mastodon website is also handled separately via POST /auth.
So I've completely disabled API account creation on lsbt.me. Web sign-up, OAuth, and existing clients keep working as before. Anyone who wants a new account just signs up once on the web as usual and can then use any client.
If you'd also rather not offer this optional native sign-up path, you can add the following to your Nginx server block, before the general location / block. The example assumes the @proxy location that many Mastodon Nginx configs already include:
location = /api/v1/accounts {
limit_except GET {
deny all;
}
try_files $uri @proxy;
}
This returns a 403 only for POST /api/v1/accounts. The read-only GET endpoint remains reachable. As always, run nginx -t afterwards and only reload once the test passes.
#Mastodon #Fediverse #MastoAdmin #FediAdmin #FediMod #FediBlock #Moderation #Registration #Spam #Nginx #SelfHosting #SysAdmin #ActivityPub