Why Does My Forgejo Instance Have Thousands of Accounts?

Anthony Wang — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 19:46:13 +0000

A few months ago, my Gitea instance for dogfooding federation was mysteriously spammed by hundreds of accounts from banana.dog. Even more strangely, the banana.dog instance itself was gone, and replaced by some weird static website. (Bad pun: maybe banana.dog didn’t like my dogfooding) I wrote a script to clean up the spam, and then promptly forgot about the whole incident.

Fast forward to now, and my Gitea-turned-Forgejo instance now has 1816 users! These aren’t normal users. In fact, most of them don’t even exist! For instance, the lexicographically first account, @0xfr33d@mstdn.social, gives me a 410 error when I try fetching its actor with curl -H 'Accept: application/activity+json' https://mstdn.social/@0xfr33d | jq.

Gitea Actually Joins the Fediverse

Anthony Wang — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 21:57:29 -0500

So I don’t know if you remember this or not, but on the first anniversary of the January 6 US Capitol riots, the Gitea Mastodon account made an announcement on the fediverse that changed my life. (Yeah, I know the January 6 riots have nothing to do with Gitea, but with all the news about the January 6 investigation lately, that’s what I think of instantly when I hear that date) Gitea was joining the fediverse! 🎉

Mastodon on Unnamed Website

Why Does My Forgejo Instance Have Thousands of Accounts?

Gitea Actually Joins the Fediverse