@dansup Central service sounds risky and Not In The Spirit Of Things.

Is there a verification step required? And could you automate a "no verification within 2hrs, auto-delete. No account activity (post/follow) within the first 12hrs; auto delete"?

@dansup Adding a "business account" flag sounds interesting. Those, who absolutely want to act commercially on Pixelfed would thereby

1. get the possibility to be generally present
2. can not clutter up the Fediverse

@dansup It depends on what do you define as spam‽ Is it all business accounts or just the usual scammy spam accounts who trick people into paying for fraudulent goods & services‽

@dansup We need this for mastodon as well. Something like stopforumspam.com but for the fediverse. Happy to help :)

Those are not business accounts, they are spamming various services for “seo links”.

@dansup - Give the user the chance to opt-out of this sort of thing? This way you don't discourage Big Money from existing on your platform, but the user doesn't have to be annoyed by it.

@dansup If someone creates an account and leave. It would nice if we send him a reminder to verify his account within a certain amount of time or we'll suspend his account.

Another option could be asking "why you're is joining" in the registration form. Then we can use do some automation to check if the answer is valid or not. Typically spammers are not going to explain or write a valid answer.

@dansup Some of my fav accounts on Instagram are organizations (various art collectives and activist groups) and businesses (like commercial galleries and interior decoration firms). Why block or devalue them?

Add a simple captcha, like I did :P

@dansup the first option seems too far fetched, it centralizes control on account creation (if I understood your post correctly).

@dansup @fediversereport like the idea. Might need more time on the label, “business account” might make professional/freelance photogs using the platform in good faith confused about which set of rules their account plays by

@dansup Why not start with the business account flag and see how it goes? You could always try the nuclear option next if that doesn't work.

Seems to me that instances could have different policies w/r/t the business account flag, with some welcoming business, others hiding it, and still others choosing some moderate limitations. That choice seems in the spirit of the Fediverse.

@dansup
I have more SEO spam businesses following me than real people. At the same time, they're not posting anything, so don't clog up the feed. However, I would like to be able to prune my followers, If I block someone, I'd like them to disappear from my followers. It's more a minor annoyance than anything serious right now.

@dansup put them on their own instance

@dansup I think a business account tag that’s rigorously enforced and blockable could be useful. We could add exceptions to the things we like and want to follow (like bookstores!).

@dansup I agree with others that manual account review is a good solution to combat unwanted accounts on an instance. Further, I don't see a problem with deleting an account if it never made any posts, after a reasonable length of time. I also think your idea in another post about letting users limit the number of posts they see from each account they follow in a given amount of time is good. Businesses will show up on fedi, leave it to instances and users to naturally defederate and block.

@dansup Welcome to our world said every Mastodon admin. The first tactic was to review sign ups but that now hurts your placement on joinmastodon so I personally need to suspend about 20-30 signups a day because they're advertising bots. I'm not sure if Pixelfed has a captcha system but Mastodon desperately needs one.

@dansup Maybe this script by @neil can be adapted for spam detection: https://mastodon.scot/@neil@glasgow.social/109832617051005111

@dansup A federated community is only as good as the moderators who put in the work. I expect folks who host or join Pixelfed to share images aren't motivated to moderate content and delete spam accounts.
If you don't deal decisively with the spammers, they will consume you. Some sort of built-in spammer check is a good start. Account creation doesn't have to be immediate.
[Take this advice from someone who was on the Internet when it was just engineers, scientists, and academics].

@dansup To distinguish spam from non spam.

Lots of small artists and business owners will post about their life, but occasionally share and promote their work. I don’t consider this spam.

Promoting your work twice every day, I'd consider spam. But just banning these accounts may be hard to police.

We should have a business flag that hides their posts from the main/public/hashtag timeline but is still available on a "Business Timeline." We'd welcome them, but filter them out of the home feed.

@dansup I don't see how spam should become business accounts. And I don't see why business accounts should have limited reach