this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Meta (lemm.ee)
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Yesss and around 800K are spam accounts.. :(
Also a way to harvest personal data and passwords, and drive traffic to instances.
New users tend to register with the busiest servers. So, start your own instance, flood it with fake users to get to the top of the rankings. Tweak Lemmy to store passwords instead of hashes. Allow open registration, sit back and wait for people to sign up with their emails and potentially-reused passwords.
Ranking instances by number of users drives undesirable behaviours all-round.
Right? We've known for well over a decade that user counts are meaningless and never reflect truth. But if it benefits your guy, oh, let's celebrate!
This is a generally BAD thing for Lemmy. Bots are going to kill it and we're letting them nest.
Well, it usually gives you the upper limit of the number of users and the order of magnitude. If Twitter says they have 330 M monthly active users, that probably means that between 1% and 99% of those are actual users. It's not a perfect statistic, but it gives you some context.
Say I'm an investor. And I want to invest in a business. And that business tells me "we have 330 million customers" and then come to find out, they only have 3.3 million customers .. I'm gonna call that fraud and courts should too.