Here you can see 2 day old post warning about the danger of not using email/captcha verification:
https://lemmy.ml/post/1345031
And here are stats of lemmy platform where it shows that we gained 200 000 lemmy users in 2 days:
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
Another tracking site with the same explosion in users: https://the-federation.info/platform/73
What do you think? Is it some sort of a bug or do people run bot farms?
Edit2: It's been now 3 days and we went from 150 000 user accounts 3 days ago to 700 000 user accounts today making it 550 000+ bot accounts and counting. Almost 80% accounts on lemmy are now bots and it may end up being an very serious issue for lemmy platform once they become active.
Edit3: It's now 4th day of the attack and the amount of accounts on lemmy has almost reached 1 200 000. Almost 90% of total userbase are now bots.
Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
ELIF why anyone should care if there are bots on the fedi?
A few persons control a large amount of bots. They can manipulate upvotes, downvotes. Silence opinions they don't like, boost the ones they support. They can flood everyone's feed with whatever topic they like. They get to choose what is important, what people get to think about. They can harass any single user, by downvoting posts or being generally unpleasant all the time, and giving the impression that the community agrees. They can create a fake impression of consensus on any given topic.
Now that bots basically pass the Turing test, they can get you to almost never interact with a real person, but instead with machines who never actual learn, listen or change their mind. That sort of thing could erode anyone's opinion of their fellow humans. That could make one think that there's no possibility of common grounds with their adversaries.
Don't underestimate the bots, they're responsible for most of the political turmoil of the last decade.
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Generally speaking I think people want to interact with other human beings, not bots.
Then there's the questionable morality of it. Companies can profit off bots scraping our info.
If you don't want your info scraped, don't put it online. Companies don't even need accounts to scrape data, since Lemmy is fundamentally public.
This is why I said questionable morality of it. I have my own opinions.
well what if they all came online and posted at once? could lemmy's servers handle it? 900k 'users' all alive at the same time?
Owners can use those bots to boost choosen posts/comments with a lot of upvotes or downvote something into oblivion if they don't like something. Bots can be also used for spam and advertising stuff. Overall, if the bots become active the platform will be fucked as the quality of everything will go down. One problem that affects us now is that we lost a reliable way of telling how much factual users are on the platform.
I don't need bots to do that.
there's no karma points on the fedi.
Karma doesn't matter, it's the power to make whatever you want visible by upvoting it hower many times you want or to make something invisible by downvoting it if you don't like it. As long the amount of downvotes/upvotes is realistic then it will be impossible to know when bots touch something.