this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
36 points (97.4% liked)

Fediverse

17717 readers
3 users here now

A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.

Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

Getting started on Fediverse;

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Is this Total User Counter true? It seems kind of wrong because the Graph is only at 300k and i cannot imagine that we grew 200k people in the last 4 hours.

The Website Url is: https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse

top 19 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Total users != active users. People seem to have a thing for multiple accounts

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This is the answer!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

i cannot imagine that we grew 200k people in the last 4 hours.

People? No. Bots and alts? Absolutely.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Chrome just gives me a happy face on the tab button now lol

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Now that's a lot

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Tabs on mobile are really just a count of how many URLs you have opened without clearing your tabs.

[–] PropaGandalf 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

mine does not even show a number anymore. I'm probably over 800 tabs on my tablet.

[–] PriorProject 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Click through to the top-growing new instance, lemmy.elest.io

It has 12k registered users, which is like 1/3 or lemmy.world. But it only has 4 users online, or 0.1% of what's online at lemmy.world right now. Parapheum has a similar massive imbalance in registered vs active users.

I haven't seen a satisfying description of what's going on here, but one thing that isn't going on is hundreds of thousands of users registering on ONLY these new instances and then not using Lemmy at all. These are synthetic accounts. Are they malicious? I dunno. They're weird at least. There's an admin listed on the frontpage of each instance, might be worth asking directly.

[–] PriorProject 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

If you filter the modlog by banned accounts you can see hundreds or thousands of accounts getting banned from the same instances: https://lemmy.world/modlog

I also see another commenter posted a link with more context. So yeah, looks like spambots in force.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can't wait for the ads to show up

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

What's wrong with advertisements? They are vital to the lifeblood of web hosts!*

* This message brought to you by the Alphabet Corporation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I hope those accounts eventually get purged, or the spambots will eat up neat usernames for no reason.

[–] PriorProject 1 points 1 year ago

These generally appear to be empty instances, likely chosen because their admins aren't sophisticated or paying attention. Even if [email protected] is taken, you can still be [email protected]. I feel like the worst thing that could happen is the spiderman pointing meme with you and a bunch of bots.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] PriorProject 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, found this later in the day. It's a good resource that discusses a wave of spambots hitting under-admin'ed instances.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Bots and spammers coming out in force. Wondering how Lemmy and the Fediverse is going to deal with that down the road.

I actually signed up on three different instances trying to find one with the best ping and best administration. I've posted in all three so I'm one user counted as three.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

There was a spam sign up attack recently.