Has anyone else noticed the zero follower, zero following accounts that are suddenly popping up during this wave of COVID cases across the globe, seemingly just to tell COVID cautious people that they're "overreacting" or to "stop being afraid" etc.? I know mastodon.social is the "front door" to mastodon, but they're always from there and I'm seriously considering blocking the whole thing rather than a half dozen bot/trolls every day.
@BE wait please give me time to move my account.
@BE It' isn't just anti-covid bots it is also pro putin bots and trolls. There seems to be an deliberate effort to cause division within the platform and it is quite possibly due to the upcoming elections. This occurred before Trump was voted into office. Please do not give up. Block and report. I know it's tiring but let's not let this become Xitter.
@Snowshadow @BE Happy to report that my experience at mastodon.social has been trouble-free! The .ru disinfo troll farms are starting to target Mastodon at large, though...
@_slotek_ I saw that from Stux. Yes it is everywhere, not only here.
I wasn't experiencing any problems either until about a week or so ago. Since then it has been increasing. <sigh> Important elections coming in many countries so there is that..... : (
@BE Not on my instance, ieji.de
Report those accounts, and I will suspend them.
Not specifically for Covid, but zero-follower bot-accounts, sure.
PS: Everybody, lock your accounts ... that means you manually approve people who ask to follow you, instead of them just automatically doing so.
Are people from mstdn.social an issue, too? When I joined, I thought I was joining mastodon.social, but I guess there were too many people joining at once so I was put in mstdn.social instead.
@Bette
Whoever creates bot accounts will most likely choose a large instance. The admin of mstdn.social takes care if he got aware of such affords.
https://mstdn.social/@stux/111800177230783839
@BE
@BE I see a lot of zero following and zero followers accounts because they set them that way I assume. But I like to block the Covid trolls. I have no interest in hearing anything a disease spreader has to say
@BE I got one following me just now that had nothing but hi what's up in there timeline
Following 1.4k people
24 followers or something
They were liking every single toot and I was on an esoteric rant I'm going to start thinking about pruning my followers because I think it's AI scrubbing
@BE I want to like this post for the 'noticing there are bots' thing, because, yes, I've been noticing boost-bots for a while, boosting only inflammatory information and never posting anything. not only from .social, all over the place.
But I don't want to like because blocking my server will make me sad and have to bifurcate my Mastodon usage and I don't wanna!!!!!!! 😅
@BE
I haven't had that happen yet, but recently I've been seeing plenty of zero follower trolls expressing all kinds of zero value opinions!