I agree, based on these statistics. Prior to the obvious jump in bot-farmed accounts, there were about 162000 active users with an active user proportion of about 0.186 (somewhere around >29000 active users).
Now there are 649k lemmy users and an active user proportion of 0.055 (~35600 according to the dashboard). If we assume those 35600 users represent the pre-bot-farming ratio of 0.186, we get 35600/0.186 or about just over 191000.
That's still an increase of probably 30k true users, unless the proportion of lurkers have also suddenly drastically increased. I don't think that's true, because, pre-bot-farming, when the user base started growing with the Reddit debacle, the proportion of active users increased accordingly. I assume that's because new users are excited to help grow the community.
Still, in the past two days alone active users went up by over 5k (15%). Maybe that'll continue exponentially, and there'll be 95k (500k total non-bot) users two weeks from now, or maybe it'll continue linearly and there'll be 70k (~385k) users.
I don't know why I spent so long thinking about this.
The way I've heard of things in federated instances, if one instance becomes bot filled and toxic, then other instances will unfederate them. It makes it worthwhile for mods of that instance to run a healthy server.
There's a bot running on one instance now that identifies itself as such and is reposting content from reddit with links going to the original article. These sorts of bots I can accept.
The reason it is likely a lot of bot accounts is someone explained how to exploit a glitch that creates thousands of bot accounts within minutes. The day after they posted the exploit, suddenly Lemmy started growing rapidly. It’s just too coincidental to not be mostly bots
I guess we'll have to give time to adapt. The fediverse altogether is having a big shakeup. I guess when people starts to find themselves at home they'll get to interact more.