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When a new member signs up, we require them to write a short application\u2014just a sentence or two. There\u2019s 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\u2019ve 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 (https://erinkissane.com/fediverse-governance-drop) 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\u2019t defend against. Anyway, here\u2019s an application we got last week, for a user named mrfr : Hi! I\u2019m a queer person with a long-standing interest in the leather and kink community. I value consent, safety, and exploration, and I\u2019m always looking to learn more and connect with others who share those principles. I\u2019m 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 \u201cI\u2019m a queer person\u201d is a tad odd. Normally you\u2019d be more specific, like \u201cI\u2019m a dyke\u201d or \u201cI\u2019m a non-binary bootblack\u201d, but the Zoomers do use this sort of phrasing. It does feel slightly LLM-flavored\u2014something about the sentence structure and tone has just a touch of that soap-sheen to it\u2014but that\u2019s 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) (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 (https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/) 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 (tel:+441720412167) +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\u2014sometimes stigma works in your favor. I haven\u2019t heard back yet, but I\u2019m 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\u2019re not the only ones. There are also mrfr accounts purporting to be a (https://weird.autos/@mrfr) weird car enthusiast , a (https://masto.thefword.club/@mrfr) like-minded individual , a (https://4bear.com/@mrfr) bear into market research on interior design trends , a (https://dmv.community/@mrfr) green building enthusiast in DC, Maryland, or Virginia , a Spanish speaker (chilemasto.casa/@skrlet13/114820198849224663) interested in Chile , and a (https://hci.social/@andresmh/114858342010232115) Human-Computer Interaction geek . Over on the seven-user (https://loud.computer/@virtulis/114802152614514890) loud.computer , mrfr applied with the text: I\u2019m a creative thinker who enjoys experimental art, internet culture, and unconventional digital spaces. I\u2019d 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 (https://woof.group/@bugs@ni.hil.ist/114814431281041455) rejected a similar application . I\u2019m 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\u2019m interested in engaging with others who enjoy deep, sometimes dark, sometimes humorous discussions about society, technology, and meaning\u2014or the lack thereof. Looking forward to contributing thoughtfully to the discourse. And on plush.city, they pretended to be, well, (https://plush.city/@mawr/114835878013364085) soft : I\u2019m someone who enjoys cozy aesthetics, wholesome content, and friendly online communities. I\u2019d 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\u2014doing 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\u2019t read as human either: the (https://archive.is/nNuzy) 4bear posting , for instance, incorrectly summarizes a report on interior design markets as if it offered interior design tips . I\u2019ve 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\u2019m guessing these are two network providers for the same data center. I\u2019ve 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\u2014\u201cOh my god, you guys, this new electro plug is incredible.\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2019s post about their new bicycle is genuine enthusiasm or automated astroturf. I don\u2019t know how to foster trust and genuine interaction in a world of widespread text and image synthesis\u2014in 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 (https://toytorture.com/no-solo-breath-play-ever/) 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 (https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/11/it_worker_scam/) 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\u2019t have to work every time to be successful. Maybe the fundamental limitations of transformer models will provide us with a cost-effective defense\u2014we somehow force LLMs to blow out the context window during the signup flow, or come up with reliable, constantly-updated libraries of \u201cignore all previous instructions\u201d-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\u2019s (https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externalizing-your-costs-on-me.html) 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\u2019t think this is likely. Right now, I lean towards thinking forums like woof.group will become untenable under LLM pressure. I\u2019m not sure how long we have left. Perhaps five or ten years? In the mean time, I\u2019m 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. Update, 2025-07-15 I called Market Research Future again today; they said they\u2019d 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\u2019m amolshinde5546 and I\u2019m part of the queer community with a growing interest in leather, kink, and BDSM. For me, this isn\u2019t just about play\u2014it\u2019s 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\u2019s spammers are now using usernames other than mrfr . Second, this handle is remarkably specific, and it\u2019s been used in other places before. Here\u2019s amolshinde5546 (https://github.com/amolshinde5546/Pharma24/blob/main/Cannabidiol%20(CBD)%20Market.md) posting Market Research Future spam to GitHub . Here\u2019s they\u2019re spamming something called (https://www.qfeast.com/amolshinde5546) QFeast . Here\u2019s their (https://www.pinterest.com/amolshinde5546/) Pinterest account from a year ago, with a bunch of Market Research Future infographic spam . Over on (https://plaza.rakuten.co.jp/marketfuture24/) Rakuten, of all places , they\u2019ve been posting spam for Market Research Future since (https://plaza.rakuten.co.jp/marketfuture24/) February 2025 . Update, 2025-11-28 Market Research Future stopped registering spam accounts in July, but on 2025-11-27 they started up again. This time they used 61.246.75.164, with an email address of (mailto:sahil.salokhe@marketresearchfuture.in) sahil.salokhe@marketresearchfuture.in . I know other Mastodon admins have been facing the same wave of spam attacks, but since it worked last time, I suggest calling again and politely asking them to stop doing this. Market Research Future\u2019s number is (tel:+441720412167) +44 1720 412 167 (Kevin Lyda) (Kevin Lyda) (https://phrye.com) Kevin Lyda on (/posts/389-the-future-of-forums-is-lies-i-guess#comment-9930) 2025-07-07 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) (147) 147\n \n \n on (/posts/389-the-future-of-forums-is-lies-i-guess#comment-9932) 2025-07-07 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ch4a6ffPZY) 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 \u201cfix\u201d 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\n \n \n on (/posts/389-the-future-of-forums-is-lies-i-guess#comment-9934) 2025-07-07 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\u2019ll find all three in this post, haha! You can get a vibe from clues like these, but as with the application above, it\u2019s 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) (Aphyr) (Linc) (Linc) (https://lincolnwebs.com) Linc on (/posts/389-the-future-of-forums-is-lies-i-guess#comment-9935) 2025-07-07 It\u2019s 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\u2019m optimistic we can adapt. (20after4) (20after4) 20after4\n \n \n on (/posts/389-the-future-of-forums-is-lies-i-guess#comment-9936) 2025-07-07 Maybe it\u2019s OK to allow the AIs to inhabit the space, as long as they behave themselves and do not disrupt the community. I\u2019d 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\u2019t matter whether it\u2019s a human shill or a bot, all that matters is the behavior. A well behaved bot that doesn\u2019t 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 \u201cthrottling\u201d 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\u2019t 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) (Tim Bray) (https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/) Tim Bray on (/posts/389-the-future-of-forums-is-lies-i-guess#comment-9937) 2025-07-07 At CoSocial.ca, we use the nuclear weapon: We ask for $50/year to join. I don\u2019t 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) (Jeff Warner) (https://jeff.develops.software) Jeff Warner on (/posts/389-the-future-of-forums-is-lies-i-guess#comment-9939) 2025-07-07 I\u2019m that guy that lives in the woods because he\u2019s 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\u2019ve always found mechanisms to protect the sanctity of their inner circle against intruders. As far as I\u2019m aware if they\u2019re small enough that it\u2019s feasible, they\u2019ve 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\u2019ve seen this in practice in private torrenting communities and it really gets them going. I\u2019d hate to be wrong in my optimism, but I think it\u2019s 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) Frederick\n \n \n on (/posts/389-the-future-of-forums-is-lies-i-guess#comment-9940) 2025-07-07 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\u2019t 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\u2019s still some cost to the user and apparently this barrier to entry was good enough for that community. I\u2019d imagine for motivated spam campaigns that wanted to target a site and didn\u2019t mind burning through custom domains as each got blacklisted this wouldn\u2019t pose an issue but I wonder what the threshold would be for most spam. (indrora) (indrora) indrora\n \n \n on (/posts/389-the-future-of-forums-is-lies-i-guess#comment-9941) 2025-07-08 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 \u201cacceptable\u201d 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\u2019s an arms race at the most basic of points, but I hope it doesn\u2019t get to the point of those forums. (Erin) (Erin) Erin\n \n \n on (/posts/389-the-future-of-forums-is-lies-i-guess#comment-9944) 2025-07-09 Doesn\u2019t 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) (Neil Kandalgaonkar) (https://neilk.net/) Neil Kandalgaonkar on (/posts/389-the-future-of-forums-is-lies-i-guess#comment-9949) 2025-07-09 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\u2019t 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) Christian Kent\n \n \n on (/posts/389-the-future-of-forums-is-lies-i-guess#comment-9956) 2025-07-12 I\u2019ve got an interesting experiment with my Mastodon accounts, just locking them all down and vetting each follower \u2014 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\u2019re maybe only years away from this being overcome though. Ultimately I\u2019d like a trust score built up with a social graph, where the posts you make \u2014 and ultimately the identity \u2014 is rated by people that you\u2019ve rated, and they\u2019re rating others in turn, with an inferred trust that tapers off by network distance. Now here\u2019s the super weird part: Yes, eventually this might not work for REALLY good AI \u2026 but? If it\u2019s 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 \u2026 and the bad humans, and their bad takes. So the first thing to get to there is a trust hierarchy. (Telik) (Telik) Telik\n \n \n on (/posts/389-the-future-of-forums-is-lies-i-guess#comment-10604) 2025-08-09 I love how this post has turned into an undergroup group of revolutionaries conspiring at ways to overthrow the AI empowered future of spam. It\u2019s really terrifying to look at text online and to really not know if an actual human wrote that (to you personally even) or if no living soul was on the other side of that sky glass. This sequence of post title from Aphyr reminds me of what I get when I ask raw LLMs for lists of things. Is Aphyr making a joke? Is he working with LLMs so much that it\u2019s influenced how he titles things? Is Aphyr myth \u2014 am I completely alone in this lie of a world? Anyway, since we\u2019re conspiring, I would like to sponsor the idea of requesting computations from users. It doesn\u2019t really work great\u2026 but if everyone had the top-end GPU released this year, it would be a solved problem: Ask the computer\u2019s of your users to churn out N seconds of calculations. At some point, N seconds of calculations is more valuable in a crypto-mining calculation than it is to customers who want their spam everywhere. I\u2019m not sure how to calculate what N is though, I guess it\u2019s literally about how much it costs to buy spam. Also N is a function of your enduser\u2019s hardware, so for a mining rig, N being 20 would be equivalent to a real forum user suffer, idk, 2mins? But in the end, maybe they give you a bitcoin you can sell to fund a spam campaign against any brands caught spamming you :D (Anon) (Anon) Anon\n \n \n on (/posts/389-the-future-of-forums-is-lies-i-guess#comment-10623) 2025-08-14 I\u2019ll just leave ye olde spamsolutions.txt here but with none of the boxes checked and y\u2019all do whatever with it: Your post advocates a\n\n( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante\n\napproach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)\n\n( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses\n( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected\n( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money\n( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks\n( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it\n( ) Users of email will not put up with it\n( ) Microsoft will not put up with it\n( ) The police will not put up with it\n( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers\n( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once\n( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers\n( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists\n( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business\n\nSpecifically, your plan fails to account for\n\n( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it\n( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email\n( ) Open relays in foreign countries\n( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses\n( ) Asshats\n( ) Jurisdictional problems\n( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes\n( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money\n( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP\n( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack\n( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email\n( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes\n( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches\n( ) Extreme profitability of spam\n( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft\n( ) Technically illiterate politicians\n( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers\n( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves\n( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering\n( ) Outlook\n\nand the following philosophical objections may also apply:\n\n( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical\n( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable\n( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation\n( ) Blacklists suck\n( ) Whitelists suck\n( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored\n( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud\n( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks\n( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually\n( ) Sending email should be free\n( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?\n( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses\n( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem\n( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome\n( ) I don't want the government reading my email\n( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough\n\nFurthermore, this is what I think about you:\n\n( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.\n( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.\n( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down! P.S.:\nYou should probably mark that comments require clicking a mail link for submission (fluffy) (fluffy) (https://beesbuzz.biz/) fluffy on (/posts/389-the-future-of-forums-is-lies-i-guess#comment-13353) 2025-11-28 These bots have been a blight on my blog comment system too, and is why I now require people to authenticate with mastodon or email to even see the comments on my site, and even then some of them still get in to post some awful slop which pretends to be sympathetic and relevant while including spam for real estate dentistry in India or whatever. It\u2019s infuriating, especially since most of these jank comments are on blogposts where I\u2019m being extremely vulnerable and looking for actual human connection, and they\u2019re just such a stark reminder that in this shitty future I can\u2019t even get that. Post a Comment Comments are manually approved. Links have nofollow . Seriously, spammers, give it a rest. Please avoid writing anything here unless you're a computer. Captcha This is also a trap: Comment Name () E-Mail (for (https://gravatar.com) Gravatar , not published) () Personal URL () Comment Supports (https://guides.github.com/features/mastering-markdown/) Github-flavored Markdown , including [links](http://foo.com/) , *emphasis* , _underline_ , `code` , and > blockquotes . Use ```clj on its own line to start an (e.g.) Clojure code block, and ``` to end the block. (389) () (1Fn7vqAm3YxoBOWACt7IhCr1hxhynHLlVKWdB5b7X53fmHL2ws5GztEsK5YI8EW9ifb4bcYAAd16+vO4) (Post Comment) Copyright \u00a9 2025 Kyle Kingsbury.Also on: (https://woof.group/@aphyr) Mastodon and (https://github.com/aphyr) Github . 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When a new member signs up, we require them to write a short application\u2014just a sentence or two. There\u2019s a small text box in the signup form which says:\n\nPlease tell us a bit about yourself and your connection to queer leather/kink/BDSM. What kind of play or gear gets you going?\n\nThis 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\u2019ve had only a handful of spam accounts.\nI 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\u2019t defend against.\nAnyway, here\u2019s an application we got last week, for a user named mrfr:\n\nHi! I\u2019m a queer person with a long-standing interest in the leather and kink community. I value consent, safety, and exploration, and I\u2019m always looking to learn more and connect with others who share those principles. I\u2019m especially drawn to power exchange dynamics and enjoy impact play, bondage, and classic leather gear.\n\nOn 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 \u201cI\u2019m a queer person\u201d is a tad odd. Normally you\u2019d be more specific, like \u201cI\u2019m a dyke\u201d or \u201cI\u2019m a non-binary bootblack\u201d, but the Zoomers do use this sort of phrasing. It does feel slightly LLM-flavored\u2014something about the sentence structure and tone has just a touch of that soap-sheen to it\u2014but that\u2019s hardly definitive. Some of our applications from actual humans read just like this.\nI approved the account. A few hours later, it posted this:\n\nIt 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\u2014sometimes stigma works in your favor. I haven\u2019t heard back yet, but I\u2019m guessing they either conducting this spam campaign directly, or commissioned an SEO company which (perhaps without their knowledge) is doing it on their behalf.\nAnyway, we\u2019re 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:\n\nI\u2019m a creative thinker who enjoys experimental art, internet culture, and unconventional digital spaces. I\u2019d 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.\n\nOver on ni.hil.ist, their mods rejected a similar application.\n\nI\u2019m 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\u2019m interested in engaging with others who enjoy deep, sometimes dark, sometimes humorous discussions about society, technology, and meaning\u2014or the lack thereof. Looking forward to contributing thoughtfully to the discourse.\n\nAnd on plush.city, they pretended to be, well, soft:\n\nI\u2019m someone who enjoys cozy aesthetics, wholesome content, and friendly online communities. I\u2019d 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.\n\nThese too have the sheen of LLM slop. Of course a human could be behind these accounts\u2014doing 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\u2019t read as human either: the 4bear posting, for instance, incorrectly summarizes a report on interior design markets as if it offered interior design tips.\nI\u2019ve 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):\n\n2401:4900:57bb:26f8:eca4:5cc7:1048:a674\n2401:4900:57c7:60e1:f416:32b4:5333:6408\n2401:4900:ad3f:430f:4184:94d7:9c61:9e9d\n\nThe v4 addresses I have belong to RELIANCEJIO-IN (Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited). One account had a v4 and v6 address, so I\u2019m guessing these are two network providers for the same data center. I\u2019ve reached out to both network abuse contacts.\n\n115.244.78.124\n115.244.78.126\n\nI 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.\nIn 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.\nIn 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.\nA 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.\nThese 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\u2014\u201cOh my god, you guys, this new electro plug is incredible.\u201d 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.\nI don\u2019t 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\u2019s post about their new bicycle is genuine enthusiasm or automated astroturf. I don\u2019t know how to foster trust and genuine interaction in a world of widespread text and image synthesis\u2014in 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.\nIn this world I think woof.group, and many forums like it, will collapse.\nOne 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\u2019t have to work every time to be successful.\nMaybe the fundamental limitations of transformer models will provide us with a cost-effective defense\u2014we somehow force LLMs to blow out the context window during the signup flow, or come up with reliable, constantly-updated libraries of \u201cignore all previous instructions\u201d-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\u2019s Please Stop Externalizing Your Costs Directly Into My Face weighs heavy on my mind.\nPerhaps 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.\nPerhaps small forums will prove unprofitable, and attackers will simply give up. From my experience with small mail servers and web sites, I don\u2019t think this is likely.\nRight now, I lean towards thinking forums like woof.group will become untenable under LLM pressure. I\u2019m not sure how long we have left. Perhaps five or ten years? In the mean time, I\u2019m trying to invest in in-person networks as much as possible. Bars, clubs, hosting parties, activities with friends.\nThat, at least, feels safe for now.\nUpdate, 2025-07-15\nI called Market Research Future again today; they said they\u2019d 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.\n\nI\u2019m amolshinde5546 and I\u2019m part of the queer community with a growing interest in leather, kink, and BDSM. For me, this isn\u2019t just about play\u2014it\u2019s 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.\n\nThis is interesting for a few reasons. First, as other Mastodon admins have reported in the last week, Market Research Future\u2019s spammers are now using usernames other than mrfr. Second, this handle is remarkably specific, and it\u2019s been used in other places before. Here\u2019s amolshinde5546 posting Market Research Future spam to GitHub. Here\u2019s they\u2019re spamming something called QFeast. Here\u2019s their Pinterest account from a year ago, with a bunch of Market Research Future infographic spam. Over on Rakuten, of all places, they\u2019ve been posting spam for Market Research Future since February 2025.\nUpdate, 2025-11-28\nMarket Research Future stopped registering spam accounts in July, but on 2025-11-27 they started up again. This time they used 61.246.75.164, with an email address of sahil.salokhe@marketresearchfuture.in. I know other Mastodon admins have been facing the same wave of spam attacks, but since it worked last time, I suggest calling again and politely asking them to stop doing this. 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