this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Fediverse
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I love Lemmy, but as others have already said, the vast majority of these signups are likely bots. Pretty spooky.
Bots and multi-accounts. I had one reddit account with no alts. Here I have like 6 accounts because of all the federated / non federated bs.
I have a similar thing going. Have 3 accounts, one on lemmy.world, one on kbin.social, and one on beehaw.org.
I can't imagine being that unlucky with your instances, maybe you're running into bugs or the less intuitive parts of Lemmy (like how links to posts and communities don't work how you'd expect them to)
It was mostly bugs/stability issues for me.
I created a lemmy account, but I've never actually been able to log into it. I even tried creating another account on lemmy, no dice.
Created a kbin account, but then found out that they were defederated temporarily due to the influx, and they had some really annoying cloudflare stuff on
Created a fedia account, but posts from other instances were delayed by like 6-8 hours, and fedia itself was (and still is) a relatively small instance.
Kbin has since refederated so it's working the best for me.
Couldn't figure out a good way to get mastadon to mesh with the ui of other instances so I created a mastadon account. Then I realized I'd gone down a rabbit hole of porn so my mastadon feed was taken over by nsfw stuff, so I made a new non-horny mastadon account.
That's seven. If beehaw ever defederates from kbin, I might make an eighth so I can participate there (unless fedia starts becoming better at updating).
3 of them were defederated by beehaw but I also have a beehaw account and then 2 others just in case... But I am sure I'm not the only one like this. So the total lemmy numbers are probably inflated... not that reddit numbers aren't also inflated.
Yeah, same here. I created one on lemmy.one... realized lemmy.world is open and has more traffic right now, so I created a new one here. I also have a kbin user for similar reasons. But still, the content flow does seem to be slowly increasing.
I have 2 accounts, lemmy and kbin.
There are probably many people with multiple accounts, for example due to reasons like UI-preferences. I prefer the lemmy.world one.
Im a newbie, why do you have so many accounts? Isn't it bothersome to switch between them for whatever you are using them for?
To each their own I guess. It's not bothersome for me to switch accounts as I normally browse each lemmy locally to make sure I'm seeing as many of the comments as possible. I never really subscribed to the "subscribe/follow" feature of reddit. I liked my front page and all my niche communities separate so when I want to read about xxx I go to xxx subreddit and read all the top posts then move to my next subreddit. To many things fall through the cracks of the front page IMO. But to each their own, again. There is no reason to run lemmy like I do vs one account if it is working for you as is.
why would you think they're all bots?
There was supposedly a post the other day about a bug that would let people creat a ton of accounts using a bot. My understanding is that pretty much the next day the amount of new users increased immensely, so the timing of it so seems a little suspect
The number of users increased immensely the next day because Hexbear.net migrated to upstream Lemmy and their users/stats started being tracked. This newest wave of users does seem to me like bots, specially because they are signing up to instances where little to no activity is happening, but who knows.
Hexbear is part of Lemmy? How could I have known this if someone linked me directly to Hexbear? I'm trying to understand this whole federation thing, I'm not used to it at all. Also, what do you mean with "upstream Lemmy"?
To my understanding, Hexbear forked (copied and modified) an older version of Lemmy and tweaked it to some of their preferences by adding their own code so they were kind of like a cousin of Lemmy. Migrating to upstream Lemmy means they've switched back to the original Lemmy project and installed one of the newer versions without their own modifications, or at least with few enough that it appears to be running Lemmy when probed by whoever is compiling these numbers.
I think they have federation turned off on their server so you still can't follow a Hexbear community from another server, but theoretically if they changed their settings to allow federation, you'd be able to follow their communities just like any other server that runs Lemmy or is compatible with Lemmy through ActivityPub.
As for how to tell Hexbear runs Lemmy, if you scroll down to the bottom of their site it has links to Lemmy documentation, the code used specifically by Hexbear, and Join Lemmy which gives you a hint even before clicking on the code link to see for yourself.
Did he say "all"?