We are aware of an ongoing wave of subscription spam throughout the fediverse.

We are investigating avenues to mitigate this, but they will likely involve deep changes in the sign-up flow that may break sign-up from existing applications.

In the meantime, you can find helpful resources at https://about.iftas.org/2026/09/11/boom-protocol-spam/

#MastoAdmin

@MastodonEngineering

Please for the love of God put the captcha before the first email is send.

And please also make it configurable to put a manual approval before the fist email is send, since captchas are circumvented today for fractions of a cent.

It would be great if the signup process generated a random verification code that users must write on paper and photograph. This would allow us to verify that accounts are not created by AIs, residential proxies, or malicious bots in general.

@m @MastodonEngineering I'm confused. Do you not believe that AIs can write numbers on a piece of paper? I believe the opposition is a bit underestimated.

We'll have to be a little more innovative than that.