Been watching over the recent surge in fediverse users for about a week now. Last week, it was climbing what i would call naturally, organically. Now for the last couple days, its been like 350k in the last 2 days.
Love to see the growth of users, but these have to be bot created accounts. I dont want this to be bot infested community. I see the value in bots when used correctly, but lets be real - general population and bots could ruin this community.
Is there anything planned? Is there work from some third party to throw off the “stableness” of Lemmy / fediverse?
People seem to be aware, and taking steps to deal with it: e.g. https://kbin.social/m/technology@beehaw.org/t/65767/Introducing-The-Lemmy-Overseer.
Exactly what I was going to link! I went down a rabbit hole last night. Found a random instance on the Overseer map that was only a few days old but had 6000 signups overnight.
Another outside user had also noticed, and had left a post calling attention to the flood of bots. At first the instance owner said they thought a glitch was messing with the numbers. Then they did some digging, and realized 6000 bots account signups had come through all at once. The high volume of unverified emails was proof enough, as they came through all at the same time, and were never actually verified. After that, they realized you could enable captcha for signups and turned it on.