this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Is Lemmy or the fediverse doing anything about the recent surge in users, that could possibly be bots? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by codenul@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
16 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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?

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[–] terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.li 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] binwiederhier@discuss.ntfy.sh 1 points 1 year ago

Not all heroes wear capes. Awesome job!

[–] JoYo@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

there's no karma to farm. there's no algorithm to game. the best they can do is spam.

[–] SmokeInFog@midwest.social 4 points 1 year ago

And spamming can be a serious problem for forums such as Lemmy communities

[–] phase_change@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

Spam’s obvious and can be dealt with. Bots altering what shows up in your feed is impossible to combat as an end user.

In some ways, this shows Lemmy is winning. It means Lemmy’s important enough to start trying to influence. It also means we’re about to go through some interesting times.

[–] BurningnnTree@lemmy.one 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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)

[–] TheRaven@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago

As an AI language model, I’m not able to confirm whether or not I’m a bot.

[–] SpliceVW@vlemmy.net 2 points 1 year ago

Did you miss the news about Reddit pissing off all their users, many of whom are now looking for alternatives?

[–] Catsrules@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

There has been a big surge in bot accounts

https://lemmy.ml/post/1391903

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..

[–] MacroCyclo@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The only bots I've seen are posting news, TIL, etc. No annoying bits so far.

[–] SSUPII@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

Eventually we will see thr shirts ones...

[–] lixus98@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

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.

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

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.