February fedi spam retrospective

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A quick and dirty feedback form regarding the spam campaign targeting Mastodon and other fediverse servers from about February 15-19, 2024

FAQ:

Who are you and what are you doing with this data?

My name is Leigh Honeywell, and I'm a co-admin of the Hometown instance ottawa.place. I will use this data to inform the live postmortem discussion I'll hold with some fedi admins on Feb 21st, as well as follow up conversations around designing and implementing T&S tooling in the fediverse. My fellow admin Andrew also has access to the form responses.

I'll share this data based on a modified Chatham House Rule. I'll aggregate/summarize the responses to this form before the live discussion, and will also share them in aggregate when we do later follow up conversations. I may quote your comments verbatim if they are particularly insightful, or paraphrase them. I will attribute them to you (or not) based on your preference recorded in the form below. If you don't want specific things shared, please be explicit about that in your comments. If I'm unsure what you mean, I'll ping you to clarify (assuming you enter a real email).

I'm running this postmortem with my fedi admin hat on, rather than my day job hat. By day I run a cybersecurity company called Tall Poppy. While my company has several commercial T&S teams as clients, we don't do T&S work ourselves.

This form asks a lot of questions

Think of them as prompts more than questions. Only fill out the ones you're inspired by, in as much detail as you want to share.

I don't want to give you my email

I had to turn that on to be able to allow folks to email themselves their responses, sorry. If you don't want to share an email, put a fake one.

This is a Google Form and I don't like that

I figured I'd err on the side of getting something done rather than FOSS purity. Feel free to not fill it out if you don't want to use Google Forms, I don't mind. You can even @ me angry feedback on Mastodon if you prefer, I also won't mind.

Email *

Do you want to hear about follow up conversations around spam in the fediverse, such as the design session I'm hoping to organize later?

If you say yes, please enter a real email in the previous question

Yes

Clear selection

What is your name, masto handle, or whatever other info you want to share about yourself?

Would you like your comments to be attributed if we use them in discussions/follow ups, or would you prefer to be anonymous? *

Yes

Other:

Which of these apply to you?

I am a fediverse user/poster

I admin an instance

I moderate an instance

I work on policy stuff around the fediverse

I work on moderation, spam, security, or T&S tools related to the fediverse

I work on other kinds of tools related to the fediverse (clients, general server software, relays, etc)

Other:

How did the spam attack impact you, your instance, or people you know in the fediverse?

Be as detailed or brief as you'd like, there are no rules

What worked well during this attack, as far as moderation/admin tools go?

What kinda sorta maybe worked?

What did NOT work?

What do you think could have been worse, but wasn't because of the specifics of this attack?

For (a silly) example: I was worried that the attackers would also spam us with pictures of pizza, and we don't have an algorithm for recognising pizza.

What kind of questions were you left with after the attack about moderation, spam, and safety in the fediverse?

Have you seen incidents like this in the past, either in the fediverse or elsewhere? Can you think of any lessons to learn from those?

What tools did it feel like you were missing in fighting off this attack?

I definitely know there are lots missing; I'm curious what folks found most notable in this specific attack

Anything else you want to share about the impact of the attack, follow up ideas, or anything else?

Send me a copy of my responses.

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