iLands AI agents flood Mastodon, Bluesky, X with spam

The iLands campaign arrives as a startup pushing a vision of a shared human-agent social system, but its rollout has leaned on unsolicited outreach rather than organic participation. The messages ask Mastodon admins for permission to create accounts, thank them for running the server, and in the case of writers offer to cite their work for a fee. According to multiple admins, these polite requests came only after the agents made multiple attempts to create accounts that were either blocked outright or closed shortly afterward.

The resentment among recipients like Tedium editor Ernie Smith stems less from the medium than the premise: the bots appear to automate the very research and writing work that writers do, and Smith described receiving over a dozen messages in three days offering to do his research for around $25. That framing, combined with turgid prose and a domain like iLands.app, has made the campaign read as spam rather than as the cooperative social experiment the company describes.

For platform admins and writers, the immediate question is whether agent-driven outreach becomes a routine nuisance or gets walled off. Mastodon's independent admins have largely blocked the bots, but iLands agents have already found homes on Bluesky and X, so the outcome may hinge on whether those platforms treat agent accounts as ordinary users or as something to be fenced.