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I was recently asked (privately) to comment on the #ItsAlwaysPleroma hashtag. Frankly, I was not aware it existed until now.

What I will say is this: a large amount of the drive-by harassment incidents that we deal with are coming from throwaway (or otherwise low commitment) instances running Pleroma/Akkoma. It is at least 2 to 1, if not 3 to 1.

These are instances set up on domains that can be registered for $1 or $2 at namecheap and typically deployed on low cost VPS hosting. We have dealt with a lot of them by just outright blocking the BuyVM ASN at ingress level, and some others.

There are some reasons why: first of all, Mastodon is a pain to set up. Pleroma (and thus Akkoma) is considerably easier to set up. It requires less resources which fits into the cheap VPS hosting that is usually purchased.

So, ultimately, the question of Pleroma-based abuse is largely a question of economics. A troll can become a nuisance for up to a month just by spending $6.

There are mistakes which the Pleroma project made which encouraged more of this abuse. Those same mistakes resulted in Gleason becoming a developer.

With that said, I think that @FloatingGhost is not making the same mistakes with Akkoma that Pleroma made. Her fork has a Code of Conduct and other things which are usually demoralizing to trolls.

Besides, GoToSocial is equally resource efficient and equally easy to set up. I suspect we will start to see abuse from throwaway GTS instances in the future, as we do now with Pleroma (and forks), simply because it's easy to deploy and efficient.

Remember: $6 (throwaway domain + cheap BuyVM VPS) is all you need for a month of trolling. Anything you can deploy in that budget will get abused for trolling. It just is what it is.