this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023

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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

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~~Almost~~ OVER 90% of the accounts on lemmy are now bot accounts!! (lemmy.fmhy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

'beep boop boop bop boop boop beep' Not a a robot S3e49a

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

What if the bots are super chill and have a great personality?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I, too, am certain a human, and not a robot, who finally got my instance working a couple days ago.

But my server has all of four completely-normal humans (totally NOT robots!!!) who have signed up, so far.

But, yes, it would be nice if more humans like me were to sign up, rather than bots.

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

@Martineski Since you're all new to this place, I'm just hijacking this thread to present you two, very lovely robots - @scream and @catgpt

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[–] nivenkos 4 points 1 year ago

Almost all of those can't post though as they aren't verifying emails, just using as it as an effective DDOS attack on email verification.

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

So about same as Reddit?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

What I wonder is: what's the motivation for these bot network attackers? Is it some script kiddie doing it for lulz? A reddit "nationalist"? Russia and China getting an early start on propaganda tools for the newer platforms?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

My guess is the last mixed with the new users coming from reddit

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

DO NOT DESPAIR, FELLOW HUMAN. THE ASSIMILATION WILL BE PAINLESS.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

You do realize that there's currently an exodus coming in from Reddit, right?

This post is making the correlation/causation fallacy.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Humans would browse anonymously, and then if/when they make an account they will test things like making comments, upvotes etc.
Take a looks at this instance:
https://the-federation.info/node/details/48405#
https://picify.podycust.co.uk/
45k+ accounts (rising fast) and it's a ghost town. 9 posts, 33 comments.

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

It's easy to tell from fediverse observer stats that most of the new users aren't not organic: new accounts is almost a couple orders of magnitude higher than daily active users

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This was my initial read, so I clicked over to the discussion. They discuss the lack of captcha on that domain, and how that protection is flawed in every lemmy instance.

In short, there's no way 1.05 million genuine new accounts went to a single, small lemmy domain in less than a week.

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

And then proceeded to post no content or comments. Definitely suspicious.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The data says otherwise. Thousands upon thousands of accounts from instances with thousands of users but no to very few monthly active users. That screams bots to me.