cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/1823812
This is an update to my previous post about suspicious inactive accounts on a handful of instances: (https://sh.itjust.works/post/998307).
I ended up messaging the admins at the 16 instances show in the attached image. I pointed out their wild user numbers, and referenced the lemmy.ninja post detailing how that instance scrubbed suspicious accounts from their user database.
6 admins responded. They had all noticed the odd accounts and either thought the numbers were wrong, or weren't sure how to purge the suspicious accounts without nuking their databases. In the end they managed to delete a combined total of about 338k dormant accounts from their instances. (One of the instances seems to have gone down since then.)
I never received a reply from the other 10 instance admins, though 8 of those 10 instances appear to be down (as of 27 July 2023). 2 instances are still up and unchanged.
Between the actively removed accounts and the downed instances, this represents a loss of 930,004 inactive Lemmy accounts!
You can see the drop in the graphs on The Federation. The total number of Lemmy accounts has been cut in half over the past 3 weeks, from a peak of 2.18M to today's 1.09M. The change is mostly from these 16 instances.
I have to admit, I did not expect such a large change when I started this! Hopefully this bodes well for Lemmy's future as a place where actual humans interact, rather than a cesspool of automated comments and upvote/downvote brigading.
That's all I have for now. Keep your stick on the ice; we're all in this together.
Should the instances that responded to you be refederrated? I’m pretty sure I saw some of them on lemmy.world’s block list. I think it would be sad for these small servers to not realize they are, in fact, not connected to the greater fediverse. On the other hand, if you’re an admin, and you don’t know what you’re doing to the point of not knowing your server was infected by hundreds of thousands of bots, maybe it’s too dangerous to refed.
Everyone has to start somewhere. We should reward honest effort instead of punishing honest effort but ignorance.
Ignorance is not an excuse.
A baby dies because you fed it 10 glasses of wine. You skip jail because you had no idea wine was not good for babies? Sure.
Did you just compare letting non-active bots on a server to killing babies? Okay if that's the comparison you really want to go with, I guess.
It's very easy to sit on a high horse and say you've never had a negative impact due to your ignorance, when your own ignorance might include things that you don't know are detrimental to others.
Are you perfect? If 7 billion people analyze your actions will none of them find you at fault? Because if even a single one does, then by your own standard, you should never be allowed a second chance by anyone.
Oh, I perfectly know I won't be liked by everyone, and I also know I'm not perfect. Nobody is.
That doesn't mean that we must reward effort "in spite of ignorance" when the consequences are horrid.
I'm all for enlightening the ignorant. But in this specific case, if they help spread vitriol and misinformation, then sorry. No excuse. It's 2023, do your homework.