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 !meta@lemmy.ml.

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

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by Martineski@lemmy.fmhy.ml to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

(page 3) 50 comments

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[–] BarrierWithAshes@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (2 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

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[–] NeXTSTEPER@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

We need Blade Runners obviously

[–] dominoko@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01000001 01001001 00100000 01110010 01100101 01110110 01101111 01101100 01110101 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110011 00100000 01100010 01100101 01100111 01110101 01101110

[–] Kranerian@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Everyone on Lemmy is a bot except you.

[–] ginerel@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

Who said I'm not a bot?

[–] rwtwm@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

Ah, I can't tell if the reference was overlooked or ignored, but nice callback anyway.

[–] admin@lemmy.xcoolgroup.com 1 points 2 years ago

Hah! This is kind of like how the one non-telepathic person is still completely unaware. Really is nice that The Onion keeps track.

[–] AmidFuror@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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

[–] MxM111@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

I disagree with both of you - I am on kbin

[–] Xperr7@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (6 children)

When I first joined the Fediverse I saw a decent amount of people saying that they didn't want kbin/lemmy to have email verification. Is this what they wanted? Fake growth?

[–] Martineski@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

I was one of those people, I didn't understand the logic behing defederating instances with open registrations but now it turns out that those instances were right about doing that even though their reason sfor defederations were different.

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[–] JoYo@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (8 children)

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

[–] Martineski@lemmy.fmhy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 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.

[–] JoYo@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I don't need bots to do that.

there's no karma points on the fedi.

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[–] CMGX78@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I am the human.

[–] match@pawb.social 1 points 2 years ago

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

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