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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

  • OpenStars@kbin.social
    15·
    2 years ago

    Test: if it says “hey guys, remember how great Reddit was, we should totally go back!?” - then it’s a bot:-P.

      • musicalcactus@midwest.social
        3·
        2 years ago

        That’s my theory too. He’s acting like a cornered animal and needs to drive traffic back to reddit. What better way to do that than to break the website power users have been migrating to and advertising on Reddit?

        Then June 30 the straggling migrants still holding out til the end will come over to a broken website.

        I think spez hopes that their broken spirit and desperation will help drive people back to reddit, but a bot influx this huge, he must be legitimately worried.

        It could also be spez bootlickers, but I would be shocked if someone who had the same knowhow to build a bot army was simultaneously stupid enough to not see the bigger picture happening at corporate.

    • ZcaT@lemmy.world
      21·
      2 years ago

      hey guys, remember how great Reddit was, we should totally go back!?

  • soft_frog@kbin.social
    15·
    2 years ago

    I work in tech, this wouldn’t surprise me.

    Where there are eyeballs there is spam. People even put spam in the Google Analytics referral field and that’s only ever going to get seen by the site owner.

    It really says nothing about the health of the ecosystem, if it’s moderated and not filling the frontpage it’s only an issue for the server admins.

    I’ve fought spammers and one alone could create these numbers in a day.

  • Flicsmo@rammy.siteEnglish
    14·
    2 years ago

    That’s worrying. Though at least it seems they’re mostly confined to a few particular instances. Defederating is a great tool that will definitely mitigate the worst of it, but at the same time this is uncharted water - there’s no real way of knowing what exactly will happen in a large scale attack.

    Just creating accounts isn’t an attack, but it’s going to suck when there actually is one. I wonder if they’ll try to be subtle and use AI or recycled content, or if they’ll just use the accounts for spam or DDoS?

    • Mechanize@feddit.itEnglish
      181·
      2 years ago

      Probably they are getting ready for some vote manipulation and astroturfing for the long run.
      You know, in case Lemmy and the Fediverse really get mainstream enough to move the public opinion in some way.

      Having a thousand accounts that can upvote a seemingly innocent post made by an active and “real” account is always useful.

      • Flicsmo@rammy.siteEnglish
        12·
        2 years ago

        Yeah good point. I think these particular bot instances are being way too obvious to do any major damage - not when it’s as simple as it is to defederate them - but what’ll happen when it’s not 100k bots on one instance, but 1000 instances with 100 bots apiece?

        Let’s hope Lemmy gets the tools needed to deal with this. I wonder how Mastodon does it? They’ve been around a while, I’m sure they’ve had similar issues.

      • socsa@lemmy.ml
        2·
        2 years ago

        These things are always going to be an issue on Lemmy though. Alt detection will basically be impossible.

    • Martineski@lemmy.fmhy.mlOPEnglish
      151·
      2 years ago

      When reddit migration begun we saw a huge bump in users and it was steadly stabilising and less users were joing, then this huge bump happened. You can go browse lemmy instances and see how many instances are ghost instances with 0 posts and comments that have tens of thousands of users.

      • HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.comEnglish
        91·
        2 years ago

        Do also note- instances with little activity aren’t that unusual though-

        My instance for example- I don’t really have any communities here, other then a few local to my server. As such, its activity… is pretty low. Everything happens elsewhere.

      • sleepyducky@lemm.eeEnglish
        5·
        2 years ago

        There a new influx in the user migration as well, as some subreddits started pinning lemmy and kbin.social instances on their subs. Also if you go on protest subreddits (such as ModCoord and Save3rdPartyApps) almost every post has a thread/comment redirecting people to the fediverse.

        • eric5949@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          2 years ago

          I love how beehaw defederated lemmy.world because too many people signed up but a bot instance with almost 50k users is fine. Sorry if I come across as harsh but I just increasingly see that instance as a complete joke.

          • T156@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            2 years ago

            In fairness, that instance probably hasn’t started interacting with their communities just yet, or else they would consider defederating. I doubt that they spend enough time to start trying to defederate from every instance over x amount of users, only the troublesome ones. They probably don’t have the manpower to scan for every instance over x amount of people, and to defederate from them, if they were already have enough trouble keeping up with sh.it.just.works and lemmy.world’s userbases.

  • Bilb!@lem.monsterEnglish
    101·
    2 years ago

    I’ve yet to see any of them start posting. On my instance none of them could pass email validation because the emails were fake. I imagine this is true for many instances with a ton of bot sign-ups.

    I think just reporting sign-ups as “users” is misleading. The user count on lemmy should reflect only approved/activated accounts, imo.

    • whatyousaidontwitter@lemm.eeEnglish
      8·
      2 years ago

      More robust instances will have to defederate instances with high concentration of bots and monitor their own new users. Maybe also implement email verification or captchas

        • ewe@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          There are almost 1000 lemmy instances already. Getting individuals to fix their signup settings so that they mandate CAPTCHA likely will have to be driven from the lemmy product update level and an agreed upon defederation list for non-conformant instances.

          And bot farms would be able to spin up new instances themselves, so being able to do a blacklist based federation model (federate with all by default except x, y, and z) isn’t going to be viable. There’s going to have to be a whitelist (federate only with a, b, and c) and maintaining that as new instances get added will be problematic without an overarching way of pushing updates of known “good” instances automatically.

    • bdonvr@thelemmy.clubEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      Anyone can spin up an instance and create a bajillion bots. That doesn’t matter at all. You cant solve that while being open source.

      The question is: is whoever doing this USING the bots? Doesnt seem like it yet. And doing it this way would be stupid as well, those bot instances would just get insta-blocked.