Yeah, I'm trying to track where these new accounts are being created, because they're not at top lemmy instances like lemmy.world or beehaw.org, which have validation measures at signup.
I believe most accounts created in the last 48 hours are bot accounts. Here is the list of top 20 fastest growing instances. Looks like 15 out of 20 were created in the last few days and has almost no active users.
Bots only target successful platforms and mastodon has survived many bot campaigns, so I’m not too worried by this. But let’s give a hug to our admins. When all those accounts start spamming, they’ll need to do a lot of mitigation. Especially if the bots come from many different domains. (and also because lemmy moderation tools are not great)
I wonder if there's a scope to auto delete accounts that are created by never return after x weeks. Or a measure of active daily unique users by IP address...
That instance's real url (at least in the DB) is lemmy.podycust.co.uk. parapheum.com is another one that has a similar situation, they have ~5k new accounts in the past days and very little activity on their instance other than the admins. I have sent messages to the admins of both instances making sure they are aware of the situation...
For fun here are the numbers of their users that show up on my instance (because they have participated somewhere my instance is federated with) compared to beehaw which has about 12.5k users:
lemmy=# select count(*) from person where instance_id = (select id from instance where domain = 'beehaw.org');
count
-------
3496
(1 row)
lemmy=# select count(*) from person where instance_id = (select id from instance where domain = 'lemmy.podycust.co.uk');
count
-------
6
(1 row)
lemmy=# select count(*) from person where instance_id = (select id from instance where domain = 'parapheum.com');
count
-------
3
(1 row)
Scams. If one account creates 1000 spam posts, you ban that account and they are all gone. If 1000 accounts create 1 spam message each, the admin has a mess