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?
I think some of it comes down to admins who left their (small) instances open (no captcha, no application, no email validation) not knowing how bad an idea that currently is given the maturity level of Lemmy and the (very recent) influx of bots. I am reaching out to the admins of the fastest growing servers according to FediDB if it looks suspicious (based on growth rate, participation rate of their users, and if the content posted by users). In many of these cases we are talking thousands of new accounts in the past few days on instances that have single-digit active daily/weekly users.
So far the responses I have gotten have been appreciative and the admins are taking action, but not everyone has responded. Also the tooling to find and delete such accounts is pretty lacking as far as I can tell.
Not all heroes wear capes. Awesome job!
Much appreciated!
What are the bot accounts being used for? I haven’t noticed any posts made by bots (unless you guys are all ChatGPT and I’m the only human here)
Sometimes I wonder if the people I’m talking to are even real humans. Their responses can be so totally out of left field.
Ravioli ravioli give me the formu-oli
Have you considered the possibility that everyone on the internet is fucking crazy
Haha, maybe. Depersonalization does seem to do weird things to people.
I doubt there’s any actual bots engaging with content on a significant level. People are just paranoid. Beep Boop.
As an AI language model, I’m not able to confirm whether or not I’m a bot.
there’s no karma to farm. there’s no algorithm to game. the best they can do is spam.
No. They can be used in influence campaigns. They can upvote the posts and comments the controllers want you to see and downvote those they don’t.
Spams obvious and can be dealt with. Altering what shows up in your feed is impossible to combat as an end user.
And spamming can be a serious problem for forums such as Lemmy communities
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.
There has been a big surge in bot accounts
Basically many of the newer instances allowed sign ups with no bot protection
This is why we can’t have nice things and need to deal with CAPTCHA and email verification etc…
The only bots I’ve seen are posting news, TIL, etc. No annoying bits so far.
I have a crosspost bot, I’m mainly testing it and it’s purpose is to use reddit as link agregator to help small communities get some content going.
It only posts external links, never OC nor a link to reddit.Also in my case the bot will get one post no older than 5 hours every hour, to prevent flooding with posts.
Did you miss the news about Reddit pissing off all their users, many of whom are now looking for alternatives?
Eh, the Internet is full of bots, particularly bots that just register and then do nothing. I wouldn’t worry about it.
I wonder what will happen to the users that already registered without email (Like me). Maybe I should add an email to my profile, just to be sure.
