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 !meta@lemmy.ml.

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~~Almost~~ OVER 90% of the accounts on lemmy are now bot accounts!! (lemmy.fmhy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Martineski@lemmy.fmhy.ml to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

(page 2) 50 comments

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[–] FinallyDebunked@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 year ago

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

[–] FrostBolt@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

What I wonder is: what's the motivation for these bot network attackers? Is it some script kiddie doing it for lulz? A reddit "nationalist"? Russia and China getting an early start on propaganda tools for the newer platforms?

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[–] mrecom@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

kbin FTW

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[–] Doll_Tow_Jet-ski@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Hahaha love the comments on this thread. You bots are alright

[–] Xperr7@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (6 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?

[–] Martineski@lemmy.fmhy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

I was one of those people, I didn't understand the logic behing defederating instances with open registrations but now it turns out that those instances were right about doing that even though their reason sfor defederations were different.

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[–] russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net 2 points 1 year ago

Ah, you see, I've already learned the perfect way to disable all the bots with a single phrase...

THIS STATEMENT IS FALSE!

[–] JoYo@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (8 children)

ELIF why anyone should care if there are bots on the fedi?

[–] BarrierWithAshes@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

well what if they all came online and posted at once? could lemmy's servers handle it? 900k 'users' all alive at the same time?

[–] Martineski@lemmy.fmhy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Owners can use those bots to boost choosen posts/comments with a lot of upvotes or downvote something into oblivion if they don't like something. Bots can be also used for spam and advertising stuff. Overall, if the bots become active the platform will be fucked as the quality of everything will go down. One problem that affects us now is that we lost a reliable way of telling how much factual users are on the platform.

[–] JoYo@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

I don't need bots to do that.

there's no karma points on the fedi.

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[–] fraydabson@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] Martineski@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Just because the bots are currently idle doesn't mean that the owners aren't preparing uses for them...

[–] Kranerian@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Everyone on Lemmy is a bot except you.

[–] ginerel@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Who said I'm not a bot?

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