In my free time, I help run a small Mastodon server for roughly six hundred queer leatherfolk. When a new member signs up, we require them to write a short application—just a sentence or two. There’s a small text box in the signup form which says:

Please tell us a bit about yourself and your connection to queer leather/kink/BDSM. What kind of play or gear gets you going?

This serves a few purposes. First, it maintains community focus. Before this question, we were flooded with signups from straight, vanilla people who wandered in to the bar (so to speak), and that made things a little awkward. Second, the application establishes a baseline for people willing and able to read text. This helps in getting people to follow server policy and talk to moderators when needed. Finally, it is remarkably effective at keeping out spammers. In almost six years of operation, we’ve had only a handful of spam accounts.

I was talking about this with Erin Kissane last year, as she and Darius Kazemi conducted research for their report on Fediverse governance. We shared a fear that Large Language Models (LLMs) would lower the cost of sophisticated, automated spam and harassment campaigns against small servers like ours in ways we simply couldn’t defend against.

Anyway, here’s an application we got last week, for a user named mrfr:

Hi! I’m a queer person with a long-standing interest in the leather and kink community. I value consent, safety, and exploration, and I’m always looking to learn more and connect with others who share those principles. I’m especially drawn to power exchange dynamics and enjoy impact play, bondage, and classic leather gear.

On the surface, this is a great application. It mentions specific kinks, it uses actual sentences, and it touches on key community concepts like consent and power exchange. Saying “I’m a queer person” is a tad odd. Normally you’d be more specific, like “I’m a dyke” or “I’m a non-binary bootblack”, but the Zoomers do use this sort of phrasing. It does feel slightly LLM-flavored—something about the sentence structure and tone has just a touch of that soap-sheen to it—but that’s hardly definitive. Some of our applications from actual humans read just like this.

I approved the account. A few hours later, it posted this:

A screenshot of the account `mrfr`, posting "Graphene Battery Breakthroughs: What You Need to Know Now. A graphene battery is an advanced type of battery that incorporates graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a two-dimensional honeycomb lattice. Known for its exceptional electrical conductivity, mechanical strength, and large surface area, graphene offers transformative potential in energy storage, particularly in enhancing the performance of lithium-ion and other types of battery, Get more info @ a marketresearchfuture URL

It turns out mrfr is short for Market Research Future, a company which produces reports about all kinds of things from batteries to interior design. They actually have phone numbers on their web site, so I called +44 1720 412 167 to ask if they were aware of the posts. It is remarkably fun to ask business people about their interest in queer BDSM—sometimes stigma works in your favor. I haven’t heard back yet, but I’m guessing they either conducting this spam campaign directly, or commissioned an SEO company which (perhaps without their knowledge) is doing it on their behalf.

Anyway, we’re not the only ones. There are also mrfr accounts purporting to be a weird car enthusiast, a like-minded individual, a bear into market research on interior design trends, a green building enthusiast in DC, Maryland, or Virginia, a Spanish speaker interested in Chile, and a Human-Computer Interaction geek. Over on the seven-user loud.computer, mrfr applied with the text:

I’m a creative thinker who enjoys experimental art, internet culture, and unconventional digital spaces. I’d like to join loud.computer to connect with others who embrace weird, bold, and expressive online creativity, and to contribute to a community that values playfulness, individuality, and artistic freedom.

Over on ni.hil.ist, their mods rejected a similar application.

I’m drawn to communities that value critical thinking, irony, and a healthy dose of existential reflection. Ni.hil.ist seems like a space that resonates with that mindset. I’m interested in engaging with others who enjoy deep, sometimes dark, sometimes humorous discussions about society, technology, and meaning—or the lack thereof. Looking forward to contributing thoughtfully to the discourse.

And on plush.city, they pretended to be, well, soft:

I’m someone who enjoys cozy aesthetics, wholesome content, and friendly online communities. I’d like to join plush.city to connect with others who appreciate soft, comforting vibes, share cute and uplifting content, and be part of a kind and supportive digital space.

These too have the sheen of LLM slop. Of course a human could be behind these accounts—doing some background research and writing out detailed, plausible applications. But this is expensive, and a quick glance at either of our sites would have told that person that we have small reach and active moderation: a poor combination for would-be spammers. The posts don’t read as human either: the 4bear posting, for instance, incorrectly summarizes a report on interior design markets as if it offered interior design tips.

I’ve corresponded with about a dozen admins about this problem. A few passed on IP addresses for the attackers. These three belong to BHARTI-MO-IN (Bharti Airtel Limited):

  • 2401:4900:57bb:26f8:eca4:5cc7:1048:a674
  • 2401:4900:57c7:60e1:f416:32b4:5333:6408
  • 2401:4900:ad3f:430f:4184:94d7:9c61:9e9d

The v4 addresses I have belong to RELIANCEJIO-IN (Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited). One account had a v4 and v6 address, so I’m guessing these are two network providers for the same data center. I’ve reached out to both network abuse contacts.

  • 115.244.78.124
  • 115.244.78.126

I strongly suspect that Market Research Future, or a subcontractor, is conducting an automated spam campaign which uses a Large Language Model to evaluate a Mastodon instance, submit a plausible application for an account, and to post slop which links to Market Research Future reports.

In some sense, this is a wildly sophisticated attack. The state of NLP seven years ago would have made this sort of thing flatly impossible. It is now effective. There is no way for moderators to robustly deny these kinds of applications without also rejecting real human beings searching for community.

In another sense, this attack is remarkably naive. All the accounts are named mrfr, which made it easy for admins to informally chat and discover the coordinated nature of the attack. They all link to the same domain, which is easy to interpret as spam. They use Indian IPs, where few of our users are located; we could reluctantly geoblock India to reduce spam. These shortcomings are trivial to overcome, and I expect they have been already, or will be shortly.

A more critical weakness is that these accounts only posted obvious spam; they made no effort to build up a plausible persona. Generating plausible human posts is more difficult, but broadly feasible with current LLM technology. It is essentially impossible for human moderators to reliably distinguish between an autistic rope bunny (hi) whose special interest is battery technology, and an LLM spambot which posts about how much they love to be tied up, and also new trends in battery chemistry. These bots have been extant on Twitter and other large social networks for years; many Fediverse moderators believe only our relative obscurity has shielded us so far.

These attacks do not have to be reliable to be successful. They only need to work often enough to be cost-effective, and the cost of LLM text generation is cheap and falling. Their sophistication will rise. Link-spam will be augmented by personal posts, images, video, and more subtle, influencer-style recommendations—“Oh my god, you guys, this new electro plug is incredible.” Networks of bots will positively interact with one another, throwing up chaff for moderators. I would not at all be surprised for LLM spambots to contest moderation decisions via email.

I don’t know how to run a community forum in this future. I do not have the time or emotional energy to screen out regular attacks by Large Language Models, with the knowledge that making the wrong decision costs a real human being their connection to a niche community. I do not know how to determine whether someone’s post about their new bicycle is genuine enthusiasm or automated astroturf. I don’t know how to foster trust and genuine interaction in a world of widespread text and image synthesis—in a world where, as one friend related this week, newbies can ask an LLM for advice on exploring their kinks, and the machine tells them to try solo breath play.

In this world I think woof.group, and many forums like it, will collapse.

One could imagine more sophisticated, high-contact interviews with applicants, but this would be time consuming. My colleagues relate stories from their companies about hiring employees who faked their interviews and calls using LLM prompts and real-time video manipulation. It is not hard to imagine that even if we had the time to talk to every applicant individually, those interviews might be successfully automated in the next few decades. Remember, it doesn’t have to work every time to be successful.

Maybe the fundamental limitations of transformer models will provide us with a cost-effective defense—we somehow force LLMs to blow out the context window during the signup flow, or come up with reliable, constantly-updated libraries of “ignore all previous instructions”-style incantations which we stamp invisibly throughout our web pages. Barring new inventions, I suspect these are unlikely to be robust against a large-scale, heterogenous mix of attackers. This arms race also sounds exhausting to keep up with. Drew DeVault’s Please Stop Externalizing Your Costs Directly Into My Face weighs heavy on my mind.

Perhaps we demand stronger assurance of identity. You only get an invite if you meet a moderator in person, or the web acquires a cryptographic web-of-trust scheme. I was that nerd trying to convince people to do GPG key-signing parties in high school, and we all know how that worked out. Perhaps in a future LLM-contaminated web, the incentives will be different. On the other hand, that kind of scheme closes off the forum to some of the people who need it most: those who are closeted, who face social or state repression, or are geographically or socially isolated.

Perhaps small forums will prove unprofitable, and attackers will simply give up. From my experience with small mail servers and web sites, I don’t think this is likely.

Right now, I lean towards thinking forums like woof.group will become untenable under LLM pressure. I’m not sure how long we have left. Perhaps five or ten years? In the mean time, I’m trying to invest in in-person networks as much as possible. Bars, clubs, hosting parties, activities with friends.

That, at least, feels safe for now.

2025-07-15 Update

I called Market Research Future again today; they said they’d stopped, but the attack is still ongoing. Today 115.244.78.126, one of the original mrfr accounts, made a new LLM-flavored request for an account named amolshinde5546, with email address amolshinde5546@gmail.com.

I’m amolshinde5546 and I’m part of the queer community with a growing interest in leather, kink, and BDSM. For me, this isn’t just about play—it’s also about identity, trust, and expression. I value the history and culture around queer leather spaces and appreciate the emphasis on consent, communication, and authenticity.

This is interesting for a few reasons. First, as other Mastodon admins have reported in the last week, Market Research Future’s spammers are now using usernames other than mrfr. Second, this handle is remarkably specific, and it’s been used in other places before. Here’s amolshinde5546 posting Market Research Future spam to GitHub. Here’s they’re spamming something called QFeast. Here’s their Pinterest account from a year ago, with a bunch of Market Research Future infographic spam. Over on Rakuten, of all places, they’ve been posting spam for Market Research Future since February 2025.

Kevin  Lyda

I was thinking of setting up a GoToSocial server for myself and some friends - like friends I know in real life. I think if lots of people did this it would solve this problem a fair bit.

147

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ch4a6ffPZY

For now, I found that this video offers a quite effective way to spot LLM writing. I can clearly see the red flags from the original mrfr application - large scale attackers would only use cheap and generic LLM models that fall into patterns of behavior like this.

The thing is, people nowadays also use LLMs to “fix” the flaws and grammatical error in their own human-written sentences, so there is a chance these AI-sounding texts come from an actual person, just re-written by AI. I think to not then accidentally screen out autistic bunnies, you can also put a sentence in the sign up page telling people to NOT use AI and just write with their own words and be as weird and flawed as they humanly could.

Aphyr on

This video is full of good hints, but ultimately none of these are reliable. Em-dashes, parallel construction, and lists of three are a normal part of human-written text. They are literally techniques taught in high school English! You’ll find all three in this post, haha!

You can get a vibe from clues like these, but as with the application above, it’s hard to reliably discriminate on small samples of text. The fact remains that this campaign is successfully fooling skeptical, LLM-aware moderators. We can be aggressive about rejecting suspected LLM text, but (as several of my friends have recently experienced) this comes at the cost of banning real humans. We can be cautious, but this allows spambots. There is no longer a reasonable discriminator.

Aphyr
Linc

It’s occurred to me that we need to move to a default-private, curated-public model to change the incentive model. Insta-publishing all content on blast is no longer sustainable. I’m optimistic we can adapt.

20after4
20after4 on

Maybe it’s OK to allow the AIs to inhabit the space, as long as they behave themselves and do not disrupt the community.

I’d suggest imposing acceptable content policies that prohibit any product promotions, affiliate links or other kinds of profitable advocacy. The specific rules probably need to be community-specific. The important thing is that you strictly enforce the policy. Then it won’t matter whether it’s a human shill or a bot, all that matters is the behavior. A well behaved bot that doesn’t disrupt your community is probably less harmful than a really badly behaved human posting link spam.

There is one aspect of bot behavior which humans have trouble matching and that is the frequency at which they can write. Since bots can operate faster than humans, they can flood the community with lots of slop before any human moderators can react. For that you need some kind of automatic request throttling.

Actually, instead of “throttling” I would suggest implementing a mechanism to automatically disable accounts when they exceed some threshold of activity. Set the threshold slightly beyond what would be reasonable for a human. Perhaps use a combination of counting the number of posts per day as well as the length of the posts. So count posts per hour and words per minute, weight the algorithm to punish numerous posts more than a couple of long-winded ones, just in case the user posts something long that they authored offline.

It might be necessary to analyze the posts of real users to find a threshold that avoids punishing humans while still adequately detecting abusive behavior.

This doesn’t solve the problem but it should help and it could work in combination with some kind of web of trust or proof of work scheme.

Tim Bray

At CoSocial.ca, we use the nuclear weapon: We ask for $50/year to join. I don’t think there is any existing spammer business model which can survive that. I also think that $50 is probably way higher than it needs to be.

Jeff Warner

I’m that guy that lives in the woods because he’s too uncomfortable to be in a niche community. I keep to myself a lot. But my heart bleeds for these spaces that absolutely need to exist and are the difference between life and death for some, especially the younger and more rural queerfolk.

Much in the same way they fall back to analog technologies on Battlestar Galactica, I heavily agree with your endorsement of in-person spaces. I also want to suggest that perhaps if you were the kind of person who tried to make GPG parties a thing, you might be jumping to the technical solutions too quickly to solve what has, bizarrely, come full circle to a social problem.

Speakeasies and all manner of secret clubs have existed since civilization was born. They’ve always found mechanisms to protect the sanctity of their inner circle against intruders. As far as I’m aware if they’re small enough that it’s feasible, they’ve invariably managed to live and die on the web of trust granted by their own membership. Technology can augment this with a reputation system or a chain-of-referrals type of thing. I’ve seen this in practice in private torrenting communities and it really gets them going.

I’d hate to be wrong in my optimism, but I think it’s going to be fine. It just might make a tweak to our thinking about this. It might take us admitting we can no longer automate social safety. It might require leaders of these communities not to think of themselves as the solemn line of defense. It may require that communities be cognizant and attentive in managing their membership capacity relative to administrative bandwidth.

Frederick
Frederick on

In a forum that was popular (100k+ members) a decade back a very effective method used that drastically reduced spam accounts was a requirement that one couldn’t use a (known) free email address (so no Gmail/Hotmail/temp email domains etc but general custom domains, .edu/etc were accepted).

Even if one set up a custom domain to hook up say Gmail as the MX behind the scenes it’s still some cost to the user and apparently this barrier to entry was good enough for that community.

I’d imagine for motivated spam campaigns that wanted to target a site and didn’t mind burning through custom domains as each got blacklisted this wouldn’t pose an issue but I wonder what the threshold would be for most spam.

indrora
indrora on

How do you get ahead of this sort of thing?

The worst forums figured it out long ago: You must engage in X ways to participate globally. This sort of thing is SUPER common in some forums, where visibility of the forum is limited to introductory content, you have to participate in a petri dish until the mods deem you “acceptable” and even then that might only open you to being able to read the contents of the forum, but following links out? Getting to see pictures? That might be another year worth of participation daily in order to do so.

It’s an arms race at the most basic of points, but I hope it doesn’t get to the point of those forums.

Erin
Erin on

Doesn’t something awful make people pay to use forums? That seems like an easy way to make it not profitable, but it is prohibitive for some obviously

Neil Kandalgaonkar

Frederick: as you already seem to be guessing, email is no longer useful as a way to distinguish spammers.

  • There are temporary mail account services that have vast stores of domains. Presumably they are snapping up disused domains all the time, so it will be exceptionally hard for blocklists to keep up.

  • Spammers have access to mass dumps of stolen credentials from real email addresses.

  • As Aphyr stated, blocking people with email accounts like Gmail also blocks perfectly legitimate users.

  • Many younger users don’t use email. Or even if they have one, they are turned off by its use conventions. You might as well be asking them for a fax number.

Christian Kent
Christian Kent on

I’ve got an interesting experiment with my Mastodon accounts, just locking them all down and vetting each follower — and it becomes quite easy to tell who is real, if a little labour intensive: Their posts are just obviously real or not real. The variety of them and the mixture of attachments; we’re maybe only years away from this being overcome though.

Ultimately I’d like a trust score built up with a social graph, where the posts you make — and ultimately the identity — is rated by people that you’ve rated, and they’re rating others in turn, with an inferred trust that tapers off by network distance.

Now here’s the super weird part: Yes, eventually this might not work for REALLY good AI … but? If it’s that good that it produces good (and trustworthy) summary thoughts? Or even new thoughts?

But why? Because eventually (not soon, but later) we want a system that works with human-ally AI. The community will be humans, spam/scam AI, and allied AI. Probably a discussion for the 2030s, but we will want the good AI to identify the bad AI … and the bad humans, and their bad takes.

So the first thing to get to there is a trust hierarchy.

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