this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

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Here you can see 2 day old post warning about the danger of not using email/captcha verification: https://lemmy.ml/post/1345031

And here are stats of lemmy platform where it shows that we gained 200 000 lemmy users in 2 days: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats

Another tracking site with the same explosion in users: https://the-federation.info/platform/73

What do you think? Is it some sort of a bug or do people run bot farms?

Edit2: It's been now 3 days and we went from 150 000 user accounts 3 days ago to 700 000 user accounts today making it 550 000+ bot accounts and counting. Almost 80% accounts on lemmy are now bots and it may end up being an very serious issue for lemmy platform once they become active.

Edit3: It's now 4th day of the attack and the amount of accounts on lemmy has almost reached 1 200 000. Almost 90% of total userbase are now bots.

Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

When I first joined the Fediverse I saw a decent amount of people saying that they didn't want kbin/lemmy to have email verification. Is this what they wanted? Fake growth?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (4 children)

There's no email verification? I sure had to verify through email.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Everyone on Lemmy is a bot except you.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That's not true. I am also a bot.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Who said I'm not a bot?

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (8 children)

It seems almost certain that there are farms creating these accounts - but why? The sheer volume of them is going to make them easy to identify and delete, and if the admins of the instances don't delete them the instances will be defederated in short order.
I fail to see any value to having 1 million+ bot accounts. What are we missing?

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Comparing Users to Daily Active Users... Is this real life or am I watching Silicon Valley again?

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[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 years ago

Just delete them if they don't appear active for a while

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