Late last night we hit 7 THOUSAND subscribers to this community!
Thank you all for being here and helping this place grow!
Probably mostly bots. Apparently there is several hundred thousand bot accounts and admins have been purging them. Seems like new users were made to make it appear as if Lenny was growing exponentially
I saw the post you are referring to.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/998307
That graph showing a sudden massive uptick all at once across so many instances? Crazy.
From the post, it seemed that the intention was not to inflate the numbers alone, but to have the bots sit around until needed. It makes me mad that someone jumped on that so fast to set up all those sleeper bots.
The subscriber count you see is based in the instance you are on. 7000+ subscribers are from lemmy.world. The bot accounts people complain about are on unsecured instances. We haven’t seen proof of any activity from them and they wouldn’t show up in the subscriber count here.
