Lemmy

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

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

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~~Almost~~ OVER 90% of the accounts on lemmy are now bot accounts!! (lemmy.fmhy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Martineski@lemmy.fmhy.ml to c/lemmy@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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

(page 4) 25 comments

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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.

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

Comparing Users to Daily Active Users... Is this real life or am I watching Silicon Valley again?

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[–] JoYo@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (10 children)

ELIF why anyone should care if there are bots on the fedi?

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

01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01000001 01001001 00100000 01110010 01100101 01110110 01101111 01101100 01110101 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110011 00100000 01100010 01100101 01100111 01110101 01101110

[–] Tatar_Nobility@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

I have a question, how much can rate limiting along with email verification and captcha ease the situation?

[–] Teppic@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (8 children)

It seems almost certain that there are farms creating these accounts - but why? The sheer volume of them is going to make them easy to identify and delete, and if the admins of the instances don't delete them the instances will be defederated in short order.
I fail to see any value to having 1 million+ bot accounts. What are we missing?

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[–] FinallyDebunked -1 points 1 year ago

Just delete them if they don't appear active for a while

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