As some of you may be aware, over the past few weeks there have been an increasing number of what I suspect are bots which will share one or even a few posts, all relevant to the communities they are shared in, at which point the account self-deletes. I’m torn as the stories are relevant, but they give me the impression of a narrative attack. I’ve seen only one of these accounts actually comment before deletion, otherwise they post and immediately nuke the account.
I have tagged mods and admins but have not heard any recognition on the problem. It’s also notable that by my impression this issue is getting worse. I noticed yesterday that communities I subscribe to which previously have not had this problem are now starting to receive these kinds of posts.
I want the fediverse to be a place to communicate with real people in good faith; this manner of posting runs contrary to that. So that begs the questions, is this actually a problem, and if so, what can be done about it?
They’ve also been throwing out rage bait in the “YSK” community. But yeah, I definitely agree it’s a problem. So much so that I’ve added some built-in filters for that in Tesseract (client-side) to deal with it. I don’t want to go into the technical details for fear of that jackass trying to counter them, but suffice it to say they’re effective based on their current M.O… I just need to finish this release and get it pushed out as it’s been approaching vaporware status over the last 1-2 months.
I think Piefed is also taking action in either its UI or backend. I don’t recall exactly what, but I saw something mentioned a week or two ago on another post complaining about that self-deleting spammer account.
Tesseract is my favorite UI; thank you for continuing to work on it!