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

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy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] 16 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Where are you getting that 90% figure? I'm seeing stratospherically higher activity than I was a week ago, I'm willing to buy half to 2/3 of those accounts being a combination of alt accounts, duplicate accounts (e.g., people moving off beehaw) and bot accounts, but 90% bots sounds implausible.

Nobody is making 1.6 million bots to target 100,000 users.

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

What about bots to talk to the bots thought?

[-] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago

The platform has no measures against farming bots that's why the number of bots is this stupid high, it's very easy to do at the moment.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

But everyone's evidence that it's happening a lot is that there are lots of new users, and that it'd be easy to make it happen.

That's conjecture, not evidence.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

You were asked to source the number you're using.

this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023

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