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...