Fediponics: Automated Bot Detection and Moderation for Mastodon Instance Administrators

Convener: Stefan Hayden (@stefan@gardenstate.social)

Website: https://fediponics.com/blog/fediponics-launching-soon (preview and video)

Notes

• Background, Stefan is admin of gardenstate.social, and had issues monitoring bot signups on the service. Began by building tooling for himself, but has been making it a more public option that others can use.

• In closed beta now, waitlist available at the web site, “launching soon”

• Stefan is giving a live demo of the software

  • Oauth option to store credentials

  • Ephemeral mode with no credentials stored (happens over API)

  • Interval polling runs on a timer, or use a Mastodon webhook

  • 70+ signals, each signal/rule is scored (configurable) which then all add up to a total score, with score thresholds for silence/limit, freeze, suspend

• Different servers have different needs, your rules might be very different than someone else’s

• Example signals: email TLDs, language of the bio, profile completion, filters for common spam terms with some default suggestions, custom keyword groups (plain text or regex), disposable email service check (anything that relies on a third party source is transparent and listed, all rules/signals are opt-in).

• Can also hook into StopForumSpam, IPQS, AbuseIPDB (bring your own API key, they offer free or low-cost options)

• If connected to IP reputation service, can fine tune by country (by adding or subtracting points)

• How to trust the service? Dry Run mode lets you set all your scoring/settings, and see what would happen if you turn the scanner on.

• Ability to share your rules/scoring to other users of the service

• Question: Can you put a negative score for any signal? Answer, no, some, working on UI to better highlight those.

• So many signals, ordered by group/type but also searchable.

• Additional tooling: automated welcome posts for new members, automated messaging using conditions (eg until you have x followers, have posted etc)

• Review log shows accounts that did not meet threshold. Action log shows accounts that were actioned (either by the Fediponics tool or by admin/moderators)

• Stats page shows you activity of the tool over time, which signals are seen the most etc.

• Some inter-instance signals intelligence, example is sharing known invite text from bots actioned on other servers.

• Fediponics will be an open source self-hosted option, and a managed option from Stefan

• Ability to switch between multiple Mastodon servers

• Email blocks allows bulk import of email domain blocks (not available in Mastodon backend)

• You can see reports, actions, all images are blurred, greyscaled

• If you log in with Mastodon, it will ask for read-only permissions to begin. Easy to remove your stored token. You can request additional permissions to allow the bot scanner to action the accounts automatically.

• Personal experience for Stefan is it handles almost all bot traffic at this point.

• Waitlist mode for now, “barreling toward launch, month or two” very low price planned for small servers on managed version

• Comment from beta-tester: massively helpful, huge reduction in the day to day bot management

Apologies…I love Fediponics which has saved us so much moderator time, but I have a broken ankle which is distracting me so I’ll say goodnight and thank you ❤️