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.
It’ll drop a little, but to a significantly higher level than it was before.
@JackFromWisconsin @hare_ware yep we had the same after other events like #eternalseptember & #twittermigaration and will be the same with #redditMigration
@dessalines @1337tux but if they’re bots they’d still count as active users assuming they aren’t idle.
In the end, neither really matters, assuming the bots aren’t causing you or your server trouble, like the thousands of posts taghing GNU SOCIAL users repeatedly a couple weeks ago. Could still be happening on instances with absantee admins. (like my original GNU SOCIAL account of @fu@2mb.social)
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.
You had me right up until that last bit - As it is I’d argue there’s too much centralization. For one thing, people underestimate the technical considerations of hosting a reddit sized social media service. Once you reach a certain point, just moving to a bigger server isn’t sufficient. Also there’s the money issue of a single instance hosting all of lemmy.
But even more so than all that, the decentralization is the whole point of the fediverse.if all of lemmy was on one instance, we’d pretty much just be right where we were with Reddit, at the mercy of whoever owns that instance. When things are properly decentralized, if an instance owner goes on a power trip, it’s users can simply migrate away, and there would be plenty of other instances of equal size with lots of content. If one instance ate all the others, you’d have to rebuild from scratch if you moved
You had me right up until that last bit - As it is I’d argue there’s too much centralization. For one thing, people underestimate the technical considerations of hosting a reddit sized social media service. Once you reach a certain point, just moving to a bigger server isn’t sufficient. Also there’s the money issue of a single instance hosting all of lemmy.
But even more so than all that, the decentralization is the whole point of the fediverse.if all of lemmy was on one instance, we’d pretty much just be right where we were with Reddit, at the mercy of whoever owns that instance. When things are properly decentralized, if an instance owner goes on a power trip, it’s users can simply migrate away, and there would be plenty of other instances of equal size with lots of content. If one instance ate all the others, you’d have to rebuild from scratch if you moved
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.
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.
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.
@funkyb @Very_Bad_Janet @1337tux those who aren’t willing to do so aren’t likely to be good fedizens willing to practice netiquette.
If understand how Fediverse software works, I think you can just set up a server, install the software, then boom, you’re federated with any instances that don’t explicitly defederate you. That being the case, anyone can set up an instance, put however many accounts they want on it, then federate. The only safeguard is defederation by each instance individually. If I’m not wrong about that, it’s definitely a security issue that needs to be addressed Fediverse wide.
