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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
Every new account isn't a bot, though. We don't have real numbers to work with yet.
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.
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.
Does your instance have tens of thousands accounts?
Nah, < 100. So, it hasn't been hit by a big bot wave at least.
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.
If you check the numbers from initial wave you will notice how realistic numbers look.
https://the-federation.info/platform/73 to see those instances open the link and sort instances by user amount.
Edit: Just noticed that this site is not up to date. There are actually around 1000 instances on lemmy now and the site shows a little over 300 instances.
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.
i pretty much consider beehaw a separate thing of its own at this point.
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.