Fediverse

Experience, mainly.

I used to run a phpbb forum, on average the bot signups outnumbered the real people 10 or 20 times. And that was with some fairly robust anti spam measures in place - something I think this platform is too new to have properly sorted out yet.

I may be wrong, I don't know how the back end here works, but any place where people can post publicly will be infested with bot signups very quickly. The only real variable is how good the anti spam measures are.

I think it's a combination of things. There are real users who have migrated to Lemmy because of reddit's horrible treatment of its users and there are also bots being created but that's normal on the internet.

I can always appreciate a good /r/TheoryOfReddit post on bots. But yeah. Despite the regularity that bots are blamed for everything, rarely is there any proof other than an expressed feeling by a live user.

I asked the same question. The answer is that there are a bunch of instances (probably 15-20) which have thousands or tens of thousands of new accounts (<1 week old) but have barely dozens of posts. Here's a sheet made by @sunaurus showing the effect. A bunch of the explosion is in open signup (no email, no captcha, no verification) and there is zero interaction on the instance. Could we be seeing half a million lurkers on instances with <200 comments combined between them in the last couple of days? I suppose it's possible, but it seems unlikely.

@DerWilliWonka @1337tux yeah, I'm guessing a lot, I didn't save the post, but I saw earlier this week some instances that were spun up brand new and in less than an hour had >5,000 users.

One of many reasons to recommend against allowing open sign-up on your instance. A lot htat have been around for longer, like lemmy.ca, require you to request an account, and answer some questions (like why do you want your accoutn on this particularl instance) and a real person clicks the check-mark button.

Some new users will be annoyed by such, but the truth is if they are annoyed by that, they probably aren't going to be good fedizens open to following good netiquette anyway.

You see a bunch of instance pop up with zero reputation and a large number of brand new users, basically none of which have any posting history m, you can be pretty sure what those accounts are.

• Actual instance admins are reporting a massive bot influx the last few days: https://lemm.ee/post/177673
• If you click through any of the stat pages people are linking, active user count grew like 20%-30% over the several days when registered user counts grew 400%. None of the previous two weeks look anything like that. Active users should grow FASTER than registered users, since probably still ~20% of registered accounts are old/abandoned from before the reddit emigration and new human accounts stay active at least for a while as people test.
• If you look at the list of top growing instances, you'll see instances with like 20k registered users and 6 (actually six) logged in users reported on their frontpage. If you compare that to instances with real humans involved, expect may 5% or 10% of registered users to show up as logged in (that will probably drop a bit over time as the current burst of engagement wans)... 0.2% of users being active is not normal.

Basically there isn't really a debate. Anyone who spends 5m looking, immediately concludes using that organic growth is like 5% or 10% per day (which is monstrously and unsustainably fast growth). The many people posting this one graph of 600k bots getting registered over 3 days just haven't thought it through for more than 3 seconds.