Making Social Media Social

As some of you might now, I am part of a team of people moderating a Mastodon server. And as so many of those servers we’ve been having some problems with fake signups lately. This is about how we mitigated the issue and how it was beneficial beyond that. So for those who don’t know what Mastodon is: It’s an open source software that you can use to connect to an open federated social network called the Fediverse. You can use many different kinds of software to be part of the Fediverse, some look a bit like microblogging services (think Twitter), some look like image services (think Instagram) some look more like reddit, etc. If you have an account that connects to the Fediverse, you can interact with all those services. But that means you need an account on a server and many people have no idea how to run a server or don’t have the resources to do so. Which is why many public servers (like the one I help maintain) offers accounts to people. There is no rule that those accounts have to…