Yeah, I'm trying to track where these new accounts are being created, because they're not at top lemmy instances like lemmy.world or beehaw.org, which have validation measures at signup.

[–] 2014MU69 19 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I believe most accounts created in the last 48 hours are bot accounts. Here is the list of top 20 fastest growing instances. Looks like 15 out of 20 were created in the last few days and has almost no active users.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago (1 children)

@2014MU69 @MicroWave
Lemmy’s first big bot campaign, yay.

Bots only target successful platforms and mastodon has survived many bot campaigns, so I’m not too worried by this. But let’s give a hug to our admins. When all those accounts start spamming, they’ll need to do a lot of mitigation. Especially if the bots come from many different domains. (and also because lemmy moderation tools are not great)

[–] MicroWave 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

@[email protected] - thanks for the info.

@[email protected] - you think we're about to see many of them defederated?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

@MicroWave
Yes, when your server is getting swarmed in spam, you first fediblock (or at least limit, when limit is supported like on mastodon).

Then you ask the admin of the instance what’s going on. You can also help them clean up the bots.

Then you can federate again once you’re 100% sure the bots are gone.

When the number of bots is high compared to the number of users, that’s even more reasons to block fast

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago

That instance's real url (at least in the DB) is lemmy.podycust.co.uk. parapheum.com is another one that has a similar situation, they have ~5k new accounts in the past days and very little activity on their instance other than the admins. I have sent messages to the admins of both instances making sure they are aware of the situation...

For fun here are the numbers of their users that show up on my instance (because they have participated somewhere my instance is federated with) compared to beehaw which has about 12.5k users:

lemmy=# select count(*) from person where instance_id = (select id from instance where domain = 'beehaw.org');
 count
-------
  3496
(1 row)

lemmy=# select count(*) from person where instance_id = (select id from instance where domain = 'lemmy.podycust.co.uk');
 count
-------
     6
(1 row)

lemmy=# select count(*) from person where instance_id = (select id from instance where domain = 'parapheum.com');
 count
-------
     3
(1 row)

Seems pretty concerning.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

Makes it easy to defederate from them at least

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

I wonder if there's a scope to auto delete accounts that are created by never return after x weeks. Or a measure of active daily unique users by IP address...

[–] nieceandtows 4 points 2 years ago

It’s like that plot in Silicon Valley. Kinda concerning.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Yeah, I think monthly active users is a better metric because I've head about some automated mass sign ups that have been happening.

[–] nieceandtows 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

What’s the point? Why do this?

[–] cerevant 11 points 2 years ago

Scams. If one account creates 1000 spam posts, you ban that account and they are all gone. If 1000 accounts create 1 spam message each, the admin has a mess

[–] rist097 3 points 2 years ago

Someone was bored and playing around, who knows. We need a better metric for number of users in any case