Fediverse

There are two groups here, bots, and bad actors. We've found that these measures have mostly stopped them both.

Bots

• Registration applications. Its been extremely easy to differentiate bots from real people by asking a series of simple questions, and only let the real people in.
• Reports: so that mods / admins can see them quickly.
• Blocking open-signup servers that don't have required applications, that usually serve as spam-attacks against the whole fediverse.

Some bots still get through occasionally, but not many compared to before. And some servers have more "lax" application questions, so they let more through.

Bad actors

• Registration applications. Most of the trolls are of a temperament where they refuse to do the work of answering questions earnestly. They can't help themselves but give obviously trolling answers, if they do even bother to do that work at all.
• Reports: same as above.
• Ban + remove. Mods and admins can ban and remove all a person's content at the click of a button. So even if the troll did the work of getting past the front door, then all their work is nullified by an action that takes less than 5 seconds. So they wasted much more of their time, than they did for admins, and accomplished nothing lasting.