We plan to disable the "live feeds" of the local and federated timelines on mastodon.social within in the next couple of weeks. They are already disabled on mastodon.online. While these feeds can be useful on smaller, topical or regional servers, they have limited use on larger servers like ours.
The live feeds present all content on the server immediately and essentially pre-moderation, which presents a particularly poor experience to new users finding the fediverse for the first time.
We have seen a recent wave of impersonation accounts which claim to be another fediverse user, often with a similar username and boosting some posts from the original account, before reaching out to followers over private mentions and claiming to have issues with their original account.
Please report them if you see them!
mastodon.social has just handled it's 250,000th report! While we acknowledge that mastodon.social's size is too large a percentage of the fediverse (and have plans to address it), one benefit of being the fediverse's front door is that bad actors come to us first.
Please report any account that claims that you need to verify your #Mastodon account to continue using it. It is a scam. Don't click the links. Real staff accounts either have a special role badge on their profile or are verified through the joinmastodon.org domain.
We are working on combating the current bot account waves. As they decide our measures are effective, they are likely to attempt attacks on other servers as well. Please be patient with the admin and moderation staff across the fediverse. Large server administrators looking for additional information are welcome to contact us by email at staff (at) mastodon.social.
