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Lemmy has multiplied it's number of users (maybe more accurately accounts) in just few days. How much do you think is the percentage of bot accounts? Is Lemmy having problem with bot farming?
Don't pay attention in the slightest to total users, active users is what counts.
Active users will probably drop off as the Reddit dust settles, but I'm liking it so far, not really that much of a jarring change once you get past the ActivityPub shananigans.
Once 3rd party apps don’t work on July 1st, that will be the real test
It'll drop a little, but to a significantly higher level than it was before.
Yeah, something similar happened to VRChat a year ago, Neos and ChilloutVR had crazy spikes in signups in the first few days of the controversy but eventually ended up with around 2x-5x online users afterwards.
One of my communities tripled in size in 2 days, with people making OC posts and no spam (so far). Other communities get a bit more lively too. Doesn't seem like it's just bots.
There's obviously bots, but some folks do multiple accounts as default (I do for sure), and others just want to have a bit of padding against instance failure. Others don't realise you don't need to have an account on an instance to access it lol.
Others don’t realise you don’t need to have an account on an instance to access it lol.
this, i think, is going to be the biggest hurdle for getting people to join the fediverse. we need seamless ways to view and subscribe to magazines on other instances than our own. either that or we need one to get big enough that it simply eats the smaller instances.
Edit: the last bit is a joke y’all: https://youtu.be/-06ki92PyVY
How much do you think is the percentage of bot accounts?
...yes.
Is Lemmy having problem with bot farming?
Will have one at some point. For not it seems most of them are created, but don't post anything (yet).
Think what will happen when they start to post and comment. They will probably just get defederated.
Edit: Now that I looked the stats, there's huge spike in posts and comments.
I think, and hope, that that might be the result of the (debatable) set up of some leddit bots? But it does not explain comments. I think we probably need to provide something similar to threat intelligence, where we propose a curated list of instances which are bots and expose it through an API, so that admins can defederate them automatically without doing extra work. It would be a nice project for the weekend!
Yes, there's a bot problem. fedidb.org now shows the following message:
A spambot influx has been observed on Lemmy instances, inflating total user counts.
We recommend using Active Users as a better metric to gauge growth.
Do you know how active users are defined because I don't usually make my own posts but I upvote and comment every now and then?
Something like fedi observer can probably only gauge posts and comments, so active users will severely undercount people actually using the platform. But we should expect posting users to grow proportionally with less visible but active users.
I saw some very big instances on fedidb yesterday. I looked at a few.... Completely empty instances, no communities, no posts, but 24k users.
I'm pretty sure those are all bot/spam accounts. So the numbers right now are very inflated imho.
It certainly didn't take long to spot servers like that on fedidb! I wonder what is causing people to make those? Load testing? Spam farm? Social experiment to see if people will sign up to an empty instance? Trying to setup an automated simulated social network like people joked reddit was where everyone is a bot except for you?
I think the most realistic answer is that they're test instances either by a tech company that believes they have a path to monetize a fediverse project or by some kind of spam farm, but the lack of any posts is still positively weird
Hah! The idea of an simulated social network sounds weirdly interesting. An idea that just pops into my head would be a (mystery) game based on a lemmy instance, where bots progress the story line and people can participate by finding clues in communities of the instance and triggering the next phase of the story by commenting in the right spots. 🤔
I think the growth in the last couple of days has been mostly bots.
l can see a sharp decline in real sign ups on my instance after the initial big wave before and during the 3 day Reddit blackout.
Maybe there will be another wave early next month but currently it has nearly completely dried up.
Why do you think it's bits? I haven't noticed any bot activity.
They are currently dormant, but those thousands of new accounts on some instances clearly show every sign of being auto-generated.
I think this cements worries that some people who are trying to run these servers don't actually understand the severity of the bot-problem online and aren't doing enough to protect themselves, not even the basics. It makes you wonder what kind of other basic cybersecurity protections they haven't set up on their servers, or if their servers are even hardened at all.
I wonder how much (if any) of this is driven by reddit to create more ambiguity to people's feelings about the fediverse? It's totally possible it's all "organic" bot growth, but if they're willing to go to the lengths they have against their own users, I also wouldn't put it past them to be trying to destroy the credibility of any "competitors" in the space.
Have all of the Lemmy instances (and kbin ones, too) now added email requirements, captcha, and maybe the little paragraph asking why you should have an account that Beehaw does?
Also, how do you identify bot accounts? Can you bulk ban accounts or.do they all have to be examined and dealt with individually?
ETA: I wasn't suggesting the paragraph. Just wondering what the instances are putting in to prevent bots. I actually tried to sign up for Beehaw, wrote my little paragraph, and then got the pinwheel of death, lol. I was never able to sign up, but lucked out with a kbin.social account. I have to add that it's pretty disappointing to be downvoted for simply asking a question. Feels like what I left at Reddit.
good grief i hope not. Email & captcha are reasonable; a short form essay on why you should be graced with the ability to participate is super cringe.
Join request forms do a good job at doing what they're designed to do.
Yeah I was a bit weirded out by that, it's like what, am I joining a cult? Anyway I actually signed up on a number of instances in search of one I like and only a couple were using an application. The rest were just captcha plus email.
I think they should come up with a better mechanism than an application. I understand the need to verify a signer is actually a human being, but an application is pretty off-putting. Problem is there's bots that can get around captcha and email authentication, AI keeps getting smarter.
"ChatGPT, write me a paragraph about why I want to join an internet forum in first person"
It is too easy to fake e-mails. You can set up a catch-all e-mail domain and spam the registration like that. I am not a fan of giving my e-mail nor collecting other people's e-mails.
My current message contains the following:
Please leave a short message (a sentence or two is enough) stating why you would like to join this instance and I will accept your application as soon as possible. The purpose of this form is to filter out spam bots, not to judge your motivation for joining.
It is not about them writing an essay to be let in. It is a very effective strategy to weed out spam accounts being registered in masse. One step is to make sure that the user made a cohesive sentence that addressees the question, and the other step is to check whether there is a sudden spike of similar new applications. Even ignoring the actual text, it is useful to be able to monitor whether you getting rate-limited bursts of account creations, and having the ability to approve/deny allows you to respond with less effort than if they succeed at creating the accounts.
Sounds like it sorts out the right kind of people? I'm not aware of anyone actually asking you to write an essay, no one would do that. 2 short answer questions does not an essay make.
I've seen at least a few posts bringing attention to a huge amount of new instances that have conspicuous user count to user activity numbers. There's definitely something to be cautious of I think.
I wonder how people come up with the bot superstition? Just a feeling or is there any valid indication of massive influx of bot accounts?
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.
What is something someone can gain by swarming an instance or forums like yours with bots? I cant wrap my head around it. Also if someone has an instance and swarms it with bot accounts, it may seem like you got a popular instance but where is the revenue if there are noone who is able to click an ad? Do they do it just for the lols?
Spin up 50 bots.
Sign them all up for lemmy.
Let accounts interact/age.
Sell accounts to companies who want to advertise as one of the cool kids.
Happened on reddit nonstop.
Any conversation, be it political or commercial. All it takes is something sounding confident, a grain of truth and lots of upvotes to convince people.
That's why I like seeing downvoted as a red flag people can pay attention to
Pretty much why Reddit removed downvotes I think... brands got tired of users raining downvotes on them for shilling lol.
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 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.
Yeah, Lemmy bot net. I looked at one server and it was ridiculous the number of users vs active. My guess is the servers that had open signups got hammered with bot signups
It's also possible people are making accounts to see what it is but not doing anything yet, but I agree there are probably lots of bots
How much do you think is the percentage of bot accounts?
Probably half of them are bots.
Is Lemmy having problem with bot farming?
Yes, and it's quite serious.
The bright side IMO is lemmy is being recognized as a valid alternative to reddit, if it wasn't, bots would have no reason to try and be here.
It is hard to say. Lemmy is doing well though.
So it went from a few thousand users to a million within the timespan of less than a month. That's insane
How did you get this measurement?
I'm on kbin, wanted to create an account on lemmy.world but apparently iCloud doesn't let confirmation email coming through so... kbin it is
I'll probably stick to kbin as well. I tried to create an account on beehaw, wrote a nice little paragraph about why I wanted to join and with no explanation my request was denied.