The spam bots I've seen in recent times have harvested accounts from feeds. That said, I think the spam actors, social media marketers, reputation management companies, phishers and other actors of questionable repute are still trying to figure out how best to use the fediverse for their purposes.

I took a look at the most recent few hundred followers on your account - I can only see info about those who are @infosec.exchange accounts, and all the ones I sampled appeared to be legit, and very few appeared to be Brazilian (though there were a few). Based on the names and bios of those on other instances, there are definitely some spam accounts among them. I even found a few here that I've taken care of.

I do think that there is a growing trend of accounts trying to collect followers by following many other accounts (sometimes repeatedly following and unfollowing over a series of days to get the account owner's attention).

At least here on infosec.exchange, we have a lot of accounts that are in "read only" mode. I don't know what they're doing or why. some have come forward and told me that they want to read the posts of select people on the fediverse, but are turned off by the prospect of interacting with people on the fediverse (I guess either because of reputation or personal experience?).

All that said, I have observed a significant uptick over the past week in spam registrations. Most of them are "profile spammers" - less are posting spam comments. Mastodon.social has been seeing a lot of them recently - particularly porn bots/girlfriends/crypto scams.

I'm going to move infosec.exchange back to moderated signups as a result, since I think we're seeing more illigetimate signups than legit ones over the past few days.

@beeoproblem