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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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy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] 13 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I've yet to see any of them start posting. On my instance none of them could pass email validation because the emails were fake. I imagine this is true for many instances with a ton of bot sign-ups.

I think just reporting sign-ups as "users" is misleading. The user count on lemmy should reflect only approved/activated accounts, imo.

Another problem is right now the only way to clean them up is to access the database directly, there are no user management tools in the application. I think that's a skill you should have if you want to run an instance successfully, but I can imagine some may be able to follow the setup, particularly the ansible setup, but be at a loss for how to properly manage it once set up.

this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
112 points (88.4% liked)

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