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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~~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 [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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy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] 5 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Are they doing anything to solve this? Because if not this platform will die

[–] bdonvr 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Anyone can spin up an instance and create a bajillion bots. That doesn't matter at all. You cant solve that while being open source.

The question is: is whoever doing this USING the bots? Doesnt seem like it yet. And doing it this way would be stupid as well, those bot instances would just get insta-blocked.

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

I'm not a bot at least. Or am I? I can look down and see hands and arms, definitely not a bot.

Unless I am a bot that was programmed to think it's human.

Hmm. I've got a lot of thinking to do.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Well, time to play SOMA again.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

So about same as Reddit?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (5 children)

What if the bots are super chill and have a great personality?

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

You do realize that there's currently an exodus coming in from Reddit, right?

This post is making the correlation/causation fallacy.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

It's easy to tell from fediverse observer stats that most of the new users aren't not organic: new accounts is almost a couple orders of magnitude higher than daily active users

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This was my initial read, so I clicked over to the discussion. They discuss the lack of captcha on that domain, and how that protection is flawed in every lemmy instance.

In short, there's no way 1.05 million genuine new accounts went to a single, small lemmy domain in less than a week.

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

And then proceeded to post no content or comments. Definitely suspicious.

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

The data says otherwise. Thousands upon thousands of accounts from instances with thousands of users but no to very few monthly active users. That screams bots to me.

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

@Martineski Since you're all new to this place, I'm just hijacking this thread to present you two, very lovely robots - @scream and @catgpt

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

DO NOT DESPAIR, FELLOW HUMAN. THE ASSIMILATION WILL BE PAINLESS.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I heard somewhere that the devs full on removed Captcha from the next release. I hope theres an alternative plan in mind, as I would hate so much to see Lemmy get overrun. It makes me think of the last time I checked USENET; it was almost entirely made up of low-effort cutty paste ads with bad grammar and links to malicious websites. The devs and admins have worked too hard for this system to see tgat happen here and I think all of us want to see it really thrive.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I, too, am certain a human, and not a robot, who finally got my instance working a couple days ago.

But my server has all of four completely-normal humans (totally NOT robots!!!) who have signed up, so far.

But, yes, it would be nice if more humans like me were to sign up, rather than bots.

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[–] [email protected] 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?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)