Some older, inactive Mastodon accounts are being turned into spam accounts.
Every account I've checked has been in the haveibeenpwned.com database, i.e. the spammers are using breaches from other websites and randomly trying e-mail/password combinations to get access to those accounts, insert spam links in the bio and start following people.
An exceptionally simple defence against this happening to you is using two-factor authentication. Check your account settings to see how to enable it.
@Gargron Another way to reduce spam accounts is to make mastodon users less incentivized to create more than one accounts.
Some people, including me, join an instance because it specializes around a topic (Art, games, socializing, computers) but people have more than one interest. So we create an account per instance that strikes our hobbies.
Reddit has subredits, this solves needing multiple usernames for subscribing to different topics. We need something like that...
@Gargron ....The more accounts someone has, the more likely those accounts can be abandoned because the users interests have changed.
This need for multiple accounts also creates stress for the users, now they have to perform their character more than once, keep up with different paswords and splitting their "self".
A simple way to create subreddit-like communities is to make the /public timeline of an instance searchable like hashtags...
@Gargron ...so you can create an account on mastodon.social, search for linuxrocks.online on the mastodon app and see the public timeline of linuxrocks.online, now you can interact with linuxy people and feel part of their community, despite being from another instance.
Just like an American teen can find a connection with an European band or artist. I may be a citizen of mastodon.social but I can relate and interact with people from another server....
@Gargron ...Some people on the GitHub issues think this features is not needed since anyone can go to any instance on a logged out web browser and add /public to the URL to preview a foreign community. But the problem is not if we can preview an instance or not, the problem is users are incentiveized not to bond with people outside of your followers and local instance.
This is not a matter of ease of use alone, it's about creating inclusive communities. We need to open up!