Lemmy exceeds million users (maybe more accurately accounts)
Lemmy exceeds million users (maybe more accurately accounts)
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?
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I wonder how people come up with the bot superstition? Just a feeling or is there any valid indication of massive influx of bot accounts?
Experience, mainly.
I used to run a phpbb forum, on average the bot signups outnumbered the real people 10 or 20 times. And that was with some fairly robust anti spam measures in place - something I think this platform is too new to have properly sorted out yet.
I may be wrong, I don't know how the back end here works, but any place where people can post publicly will be infested with bot signups very quickly. The only real variable is how good the anti spam measures are.
What is something someone can gain by swarming an instance or forums like yours with bots? I cant wrap my head around it. Also if someone has an instance and swarms it with bot accounts, it may seem like you got a popular instance but where is the revenue if there are noone who is able to click an ad? Do they do it just for the lols?
Spin up 50 bots.
Sign them all up for lemmy.
Let accounts interact/age.
Sell accounts to companies who want to advertise as one of the cool kids.Happened on reddit nonstop.
Any conversation, be it political or commercial. All it takes is something sounding confident, a grain of truth and lots of upvotes to convince people.
That's why I like seeing downvoted as a red flag people can pay attention to
Pretty much why Reddit removed downvotes I think... brands got tired of users raining downvotes on them for shilling lol.
@GizmoLion @1337tux @TheAngryBad @DerWilliWonka I am on board with this
@realcaseyrollins @GizmoLion @1337tux @DerWilliWonka @TheAngryBad meaning you want to sell fedi accounts to capitalists?
@fu @GizmoLion @1337tux @DerWilliWonka @TheAngryBad I'm not on board with the selling part tbh, but I like the bot idea, it worked for #Reddit like the guy said
I feel like you're reading a completely different conversation...
@GizmoLion @realcaseyrollins @1337tux @DerWilliWonka @TheAngryBad its not likely, but with how the Fediverse works its possible, whether slow federation between certain servers (for example I frequently will have posts Friendica tells me have posted to 130/135 servers within a minute but those last few can take days or never post at all) also you guys might not both see the same conversation based on who you've blocked, or been blocked by, etc. If you ever want to verify, you should be able to view it on their instance (on Kbin this is what is listed under MORE as LINK TO FEDIVERSE)
@realcaseyrollins @GizmoLion @1337tux @DerWilliWonka @TheAngryBad if it's not a PUBLIC conversation of course you won't be able to see it on their server if you don't have an account on that server that is included in the private body (like Friendica's default of "friends only")
Looks like you are @ing someone I can't see.
Well, that's the first major point against this fediverse business... Who's going to stick around to have a conversation when everyone's only getting bits of it? That's kinda antithetical to discussion...
I have some tiny bit of doubts left but at least it does sound like one possible reason for people swarming servers with bots
Except that Lemmy doesn't show overall karma, so there's no use in doing any of that here.
Just the same, having a post history and upvote history lends credibility to the "opinion" of the brand.
@DerWilliWonka @1337tux @TheAngryBad there are cetainly some who do it for the lulz, and there are some who probably do it as a way to encourage others to make security changes to the platform. Personally, I think it would be more useful to file issues via git, but what do I know, I'm just an old-timer who quit college after failing security class, and thereby losing my scholarship.
In my particular case (as was the case with most forums in the day), it was really just about spamming boards with links to whatever shitty ED pills or crypto scam they were trying to sell.
They were never really sophisticated, but never really had to be either. A spammer could spend a few minutes writing a script for a bot to crawl the web looking for phpbb signup pages, then try to create an account on any it could find and immediately post the links. They could post hundreds of links on dozens of different forums with just a few minutes work - and then do it all again tomorrow with a bunch of new signups.
I think it's a combination of things. There are real users who have migrated to Lemmy because of reddit's horrible treatment of its users and there are also bots being created but that's normal on the internet.
@DerWilliWonka @1337tux yeah, I'm guessing a lot, I didn't save the post, but I saw earlier this week some instances that were spun up brand new and in less than an hour had >5,000 users.
One of many reasons to recommend against allowing open sign-up on your instance. A lot htat have been around for longer, like lemmy.ca, require you to request an account, and answer some questions (like why do you want your accoutn on this particularl instance) and a real person clicks the check-mark button.
Some new users will be annoyed by such, but the truth is if they are annoyed by that, they probably aren't going to be good fedizens open to following good netiquette anyway.
I asked the same question. The answer is that there are a bunch of instances (probably 15-20) which have thousands or tens of thousands of new accounts (<1 week old) but have barely dozens of posts. Here's a sheet made by @sunaurus showing the effect. A bunch of the explosion is in open signup (no email, no captcha, no verification) and there is zero interaction on the instance. Could we be seeing half a million lurkers on instances with <200 comments combined between them in the last couple of days? I suppose it's possible, but it seems unlikely.
Thank you for the clarification. Do you have by any chance data at hand about the development of active users? Or may you direct me to a community of where I get these kinde of data?
I can always appreciate a good /r/TheoryOfReddit post on bots. But yeah. Despite the regularity that bots are blamed for everything, rarely is there any proof other than an expressed feeling by a live user.
- Actual instance admins are reporting a massive bot influx the last few days: https://lemm.ee/post/177673
- If you click through any of the stat pages people are linking, active user count grew like 20%-30% over the several days when registered user counts grew 400%. None of the previous two weeks look anything like that. Active users should grow FASTER than registered users, since probably still ~20% of registered accounts are old/abandoned from before the reddit emigration and new human accounts stay active at least for a while as people test.
- If you look at the list of top growing instances, you'll see instances with like 20k registered users and 6 (actually six) logged in users reported on their frontpage. If you compare that to instances with real humans involved, expect may 5% or 10% of registered users to show up as logged in (that will probably drop a bit over time as the current burst of engagement wans)... 0.2% of users being active is not normal.
Basically there isn't really a debate. Anyone who spends 5m looking, immediately concludes using that organic growth is like 5% or 10% per day (which is monstrously and unsustainably fast growth). The many people posting this one graph of 600k bots getting registered over 3 days just haven't thought it through for more than 3 seconds.
You see a bunch of instance pop up with zero reputation and a large number of brand new users, basically none of which have any posting history m, you can be pretty sure what those accounts are.