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?
How much do you think is the percentage of bot accounts?
…yes.
Is Lemmy having problem with bot farming?
Will have one at some point. For not it seems most of them are created, but don’t post anything (yet).
Think what will happen when they start to post and comment. They will probably just get defederated.
Edit: Now that I looked the stats, there’s huge spike in posts and comments.
you can’t just defederate individuals accounts, these bots have their home on places like shit and world
Yes, there’s a bot problem. fedidb.org now shows the following message:
A spambot influx has been observed on Lemmy instances, inflating total user counts.
We recommend using Active Users as a better metric to gauge growth.
Extremely low compared to the total growth: Per https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats Lemmy grew from 150,000 to 1,150,000 total users in the last four days, but for the active users, the growth was 30,000 to 39,000. If you extrapolate that, there are maybe 200,000 real Lemmy users now.
Compared to account growth that’s low but a 33% growth in four days is hard to call “low”
Do you know how active users are defined because I don’t usually make my own posts but I upvote and comment every now and then?
How much do you think is the percentage of bot accounts?
Probably half of them are bots.
Is Lemmy having problem with bot farming?
Yes, and it’s quite serious.
The bright side IMO is lemmy is being recognized as a valid alternative to reddit, if it wasn’t, bots would have no reason to try and be here.
It’s not “me” thinking, there are several posts bringing this problem to the attention of admins, basically they took advantage of servers with open registration to “spam create” thousands of accounts, you don’t see signs because they’re “dormant” for now (that’s what bots do when a spam campaign is not currently active), you can recognize it by confronting number of users with user activity, for example, if you see a server with 6k users and only 5-6 posts, it means it’s a bot farm waiting for a spam campaign to start.
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.
I saw some very big instances on fedidb yesterday. I looked at a few… Completely empty instances, no communities, no posts, but 24k users.
I’m pretty sure those are all bot/spam accounts. So the numbers right now are very inflated imho.
It certainly didn’t take long to spot servers like that on fedidb! I wonder what is causing people to make those? Load testing? Spam farm? Social experiment to see if people will sign up to an empty instance? Trying to setup an automated simulated social network like people joked reddit was where everyone is a bot except for you?
I think the most realistic answer is that they’re test instances either by a tech company that believes they have a path to monetize a fediverse project or by some kind of spam farm, but the lack of any posts is still positively weird
Hah! The idea of an simulated social network sounds weirdly interesting. An idea that just pops into my head would be a (mystery) game based on a lemmy instance, where bots progress the story line and people can participate by finding clues in communities of the instance and triggering the next phase of the story by commenting in the right spots. 🤔
