this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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82 users here now

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

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy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] 2 points 1 year ago

“This is the worst kind of discrimination there is: the kind against me!” - Bender Bending Rodríguez

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)
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[–] CMGX78 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

hello human! would you like to look at a t-shirt that contains memes curated for you

[–] philz 1 points 1 year ago

Beep booop I am a real human.

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

I have a question, how much can rate limiting along with email verification and captcha ease the situation?

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

yeah this isn't good. they're gonna have to do something about this asap before all those bots come alive and effective dos the site out of existance

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

DDoS usually cost money to run, Lemmy/Kbin are small potatos with no cash to ransom, so there’s not really a point except to troll, in which case users can just spin up more servers and push back on the attacker’s cost/impact.

I do get the sense it would be relatively easy to DoS Lemmy, it doesn’t seem very efficient.

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

well there could be other reasons. account parking, corporate warfare, etc.

bots sent from reddit to undermine lemmy! Probably not but I don't like it. Plus, could just be troll thing to take the sites down too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (7 children)

ELIF why anyone should care if there are bots on the fedi?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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

We need Blade Runners obviously

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

Everyone on Lemmy is a bot except you.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's not true. I am also a bot.

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

I disagree with both of you - I am on kbin

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

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