If you want to help make Fedi a better place, follow these simple steps:
1. search for a bad actor¹
2. report that bad actor²
3. repeat³
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¹ scam/spam accounts, marketing bots, nonconsensual porn (NCII), etc.
² include a reason and relevant posts
³ even one helps, but 3-5 is better
I'm seeing 100+ boosts, and zero new reports 😐
This is like voting, it's all y'all's civic duty to help make Fedi a better space for everyone to live in.
@alice
Elon Musk just followed me - I'm the 11th person he followed, imagine that!
You don't suppose... Nah, couldn't be a bot, could it? Hmmm...
@alice Gotta weed the Fedi so the flowers can grow.
@alice worth remembering that whereas Instagram basically lets your reports rot in an unread inbox and never actually taking action, the mods on the fediverse by-and-large actually block or otherwise handle bad actors on the fediverse who are behaving in ways that aren't conducive towards community building.
If you're still operating on your habits from the platforms where reporting doesn't do anything, it's worth reconsidering that habit.
@riverpunk @alice Oh my reports of hatespeech, antisemitism, rasicm and transphobia were denied within 72h.
Nov 5, 2026, 3:27 AM@alice Do I report them only to their instance, or is there a special badactor place?
Yeah, earlier today an account followed me that had stolen the avatar of evacide EFF representative on mastodon on. Different account name and server but stolen avatar.
I guess impersonation is kind of been going around but flagged and bagged and reported
@alice So you want me to squeal on William Shatner? Why would I do that?
@msbellows oh no, not the Shat!
@alice I love... Shatner. I... do. But no one... can... claim he's a good actor.
@alice Curious: I often see and report those weird drive-by bots that just reply to 15-20 people with some unrelated nonsense... is there any benefit to checking *all* of the posts they've made? Or is it good enough to select the first couple so it's clear what's going on and leave it at that?
@screambiogenesis if they're mentioning people from a bunch of different servers, checking more boxes will notify those servers, but those shotgun spam accounts tend to get banned fast anyway.
If it's an account that has been active for a while, then notifying more instances of the bad behavior will protect more people.
The only downside to checking a ton of posts is that admins have to scroll to the bottom of the report to take action 🤷🏼♀️
@alice Ha, whether it makes the report super-long was part of what I was wondering. Thanks for the info!
@alice Yesss! I really appreciate all you do to educate the community about this 👏 I think a good place for folk to start the search is their own followers (if they have an open policy for allowing followers) the more popular the fediverse is becoming the more it is attracting the bad actors.
If I see shit, I do try to report it!
@alice you're doing such a good job I'm not seeing anything to report.
@alice I'm trying, but apparently my neighborhood is nice enough garbage barely federates to me!
(❤️ my admin and mufos)
@alice
I hardly ever see awful behavior, likely because of keyword mutes. My feed is reasonably well curated, though it does need a little maintenance when time allows.
If I see something worth reporting, I definitely will. I simply haven't seen anything which breaks the rules in quite some time. My account's safety features protect me from much of it.
@alice any tips for #1? ever since "local" disappeared i only see who i follow. should i be lurking on common hashtags?
@snosrapkungfu I search for slurs, dogwhistles, and common derogatory porn terms.
Then I find a "stool pigeon" and go through their follows/followers/replies and report/suspend all the threats I find there. Finally, I report/suspend the pigeon's account.
@alice i can report this if you want :< /j
thanks for moderating lovely being
Nov 5, 2026, 6:40 PM@alice
Just curious as I don't do moderation/administration of any fedi instance: I guess you already have tooling/automations/filters for this, right?
@joxean sadly, most of it is a manual process. I wish vanilla Mastodon had better moderation tooling for the threats we actually face.
@alice
TBH the spam bot problem is way worse on Bluesky than it is here. Especially people trying to exploit the Gaza genocide by pretending to be Palestinian parents who need money to help their kids.
@Phracker2Art I ban those scam accounts like every day.
If you don't see many here, thank your mods for their work, because there are *thousands* of fake Gaza accounts (which sucks for the hundreds of real ones).
Also, we can thank Aral and @gazaverified for all the work they do to screen and verify accounts.
@alice @gazaverified
I think a good rule of thumb is that if they randomly follow you out of nowhere, they're scam bots. I tend to just automatically report any Gaza-themed accounts that do this. It's very easy to tell that they're fake from their behavior, as well as the ALL CAPS usernames they use.