- cross-posted to:
- main@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- main@sh.itjust.works
cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/1823812
This is an update to my previous post about suspicious inactive accounts on a handful of instances: (https://sh.itjust.works/post/998307).
I ended up messaging the admins at the 16 instances show in the attached image. I pointed out their wild user numbers, and referenced the lemmy.ninja post detailing how that instance scrubbed suspicious accounts from their user database.
6 admins responded. They had all noticed the odd accounts and either thought the numbers were wrong, or weren’t sure how to purge the suspicious accounts without nuking their databases. In the end they managed to delete a combined total of about 338k dormant accounts from their instances. (One of the instances seems to have gone down since then.)
I never received a reply from the other 10 instance admins, though 8 of those 10 instances appear to be down (as of 27 July 2023). 2 instances are still up and unchanged.
Between the actively removed accounts and the downed instances, this represents a loss of 930,004 inactive Lemmy accounts!
You can see the drop in the graphs on The Federation. The total number of Lemmy accounts has been cut in half over the past 3 weeks, from a peak of 2.18M to today’s 1.09M. The change is mostly from these 16 instances.
I have to admit, I did not expect such a large change when I started this! Hopefully this bodes well for Lemmy’s future as a place where actual humans interact, rather than a cesspool of automated comments and upvote/downvote brigading.
That’s all I have for now. Keep your stick on the ice; we’re all in this together.
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What are qualifications for being an active account? I didn’t see any details in the other thread about it either, just the graphs. Is it just post/comment creation? Is it page views? Log ins? Does voting up or down register an account as Active?
If it’s only post/comments then you’re possibly deleting a bunch of lurkers too.
We need to find a way to get indexed on Google, Duckduckgo and other search engines.
Probably happening to some degree already, unless no robots is checked. No way lemmy jumps as high as reddit in seo for random things for a long while
Naa…I think instance admins have to let the crawlers index the content. Not sure if Admins have enabled it
A major advantage of the old place was that you could search up keywords and find a discussion on it. When I wasn’t browsing, the other times that I’d end up using it was for when I needed to look stuff up.
I’m not sure what the pros cons ratio is though.
Good work guys.
Dude wtf, there are relatively many fucking servers which have well over thousands of inactive users. I checked some and it seems the mods of them are just posting under 5 posts on some other servers and than creating some communities in their own server and then leave quietly. Thats too sus… It may be too much paranoiac to think that there is more going about those servers but I just cant stop thinking it is too absurd
Some of them are probably lurkers. Might be good for Lemmy to store the last login time, so admins can consider that when purging accounts.
