I created an account on mastodon.social a few days ago. A day after creation, my account was suspended. My appeal was denied and no reason was given. So I assumed mastodon.social was not accepting new accounts, so I moved over to mastodon.online and created an account there. Today that account was suspended as well, again without reason. I didn’t post anything from either account. My only actions were to follow a few people within tech.
Looking at previous posts here, people are laughing at complaints about difficulties of joining mastodon and pushing it away as a simple task. I have now attempted to join two of the highest suggested servers of mastodon and gotten suspended from both. I am uninterested in shotgunning servers until I find one which doesn’t suspend me without reason.
How is the onboarding process of mastodon supposed to work if the top suggested servers are suspending new accounts without warning or reason?
The correct answer is it’s because you are on someone else’s server and subject to the whims of its admin
I completely understand that mastodon are compiled of individual admins per server, and they can do what they want with their instance. But I’d expect the highest suggested instances to at least answer the appeals when suspending users. If I joined a random tiny instance of someone who wants to keep it to themselves, I’d understand, but the instances I joined are huge with a welcomming message etc.
No, quite the contrary: the fact that these instances are the most popular also makes them the biggest targets for automated sock puppet and bot account creation. These guys are even more paranoid than many smaller instances about user names that appear to be randomly generated. Your own user name, as others in this thread suggested, would easily trigger their auto-ban rules. And a human moderator would take one look at the name and think the same thing.
And it is possible these auto-ban rules are builtin to the Mastodon server reference implementation and enabled by default, meaning it is likely that all other Mastodon instances you might try to sign up for would also have these same auto-ban rules. I don’t know for sure, but I am not willing to play around and find out. So it looks to me like your only choice is to choose a different username. Sorry.
God damnit, it took me until now to actually read their username. It’s the youtube URL for the rickroll video (ending in XcQ). I think you’re right though - it was obviously autogenerated originally and only took on its current meaning via Youtube’s use of the string.
You quoted the appeal-part of my comment. I would understand if a bot is implemented to suspend users with usernames which is just a generated string of high entropy, like my own. But rejecting an appeal should not be an automated process.
I can’t imagine that the automated ban helps a lot either. Generating random usernames which looks like real people’s usernames is pretty much a trivial task. Using a high-entropy string is just a choice on the developers side.
My point is that a human can’t tell the difference between a name generated by a bot and your username either. So you’re right that the appeal ought not be automated, but regardless of whether it is or not, you are not likely to get an appeal. It will just go straight to ban, and a human in the loop would take a look at the name, see high entropy, and not wouldn’t think twice about whether the automated ban was correct. Like I said, they are paranoid because they are the largest Mastodon instances, and they have had to deal with concerted bot attacks a few times already.
Sure, and I’d probably understand it from the instance owners perspective better if I were in their shoes. And to be fair to them, my username was randomly generated by youtube at some point. So if they just outright reject appeals from generated usernames, I definitely fall into that category. I just feel like that’s a bad process and practice for instances which are among the top of the suggested list for new users.
Considering that some bots might also have automatic appeals integrated makes it more reasonable to expect that automated rejection.
I’d also argue that regardless of the server size, it takes literal seconds to explain why your account is getting banned, it’s absolutely within the realm of reason that if your system allowed automated signups that you as an admin have an obligation to not be a shitcunt and at least give a reason as to why you’re banning accounts.
The problem is scaling. If it takes say, 30 seconds per name, but the number of n is very large, then if you ban say, 1000 dudes a day then the 30,000 seconds becomes a requirement of 8 hours of mod explanations (collectively) per day. It’s a scaling issue, in short.