this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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3 users here now

Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.

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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

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[–] BarrierWithAshes@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

yeah this isn't good. they're gonna have to do something about this asap before all those bots come alive and effective dos the site out of existance

[–] soft_frog@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

DDoS usually cost money to run, Lemmy/Kbin are small potatos with no cash to ransom, so there’s not really a point except to troll, in which case users can just spin up more servers and push back on the attacker’s cost/impact.

I do get the sense it would be relatively easy to DoS Lemmy, it doesn’t seem very efficient.

[–] BarrierWithAshes@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

well there could be other reasons. account parking, corporate warfare, etc.

bots sent from reddit to undermine lemmy! Probably not but I don't like it. Plus, could just be troll thing to take the sites down too.