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?
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.