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 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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