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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
You do realize that there’s currently an exodus coming in from Reddit, right?
This post is making the correlation/causation fallacy.
Humans would browse anonymously, and then if/when they make an account they will test things like making comments, upvotes etc.
Take a looks at this instance:
https://the-federation.info/node/details/48405#
https://picify.podycust.co.uk/
45k+ accounts (rising fast) and it’s a ghost town. 9 posts, 33 comments.
It’s easy to tell from fediverse observer stats that most of the new users aren’t not organic: new accounts is almost a couple orders of magnitude higher than daily active users
This was my initial read, so I clicked over to the discussion. They discuss the lack of captcha on that domain, and how that protection is flawed in every lemmy instance.
In short, there’s no way 1.05 million genuine new accounts went to a single, small lemmy domain in less than a week.
And then proceeded to post no content or comments. Definitely suspicious.
The data says otherwise. Thousands upon thousands of accounts from instances with thousands of users but no to very few monthly active users. That screams bots to me.