Almost OVER 90% of the accounts on lemmy are now bot accounts!!
Almost OVER 90% of the accounts on lemmy are now bot accounts!!
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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
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That's worrying. Though at least it seems they're mostly confined to a few particular instances. Defederating is a great tool that will definitely mitigate the worst of it, but at the same time this is uncharted water - there's no real way of knowing what exactly will happen in a large scale attack.
Just creating accounts isn't an attack, but it's going to suck when there actually is one. I wonder if they'll try to be subtle and use AI or recycled content, or if they'll just use the accounts for spam or DDoS?
Where are you getting that 90% figure? I'm seeing stratospherically higher activity than I was a week ago, I'm willing to buy half to 2/3 of those accounts being a combination of alt accounts, duplicate accounts (e.g., people moving off beehaw) and bot accounts, but 90% bots sounds implausible.
Nobody is making 1.6 million bots to target 100,000 users.
I work in tech, this wouldn’t surprise me.
Where there are eyeballs there is spam. People even put spam in the Google Analytics referral field and that’s only ever going to get seen by the site owner.
It really says nothing about the health of the ecosystem, if it’s moderated and not filling the frontpage it’s only an issue for the server admins.
I’ve fought spammers and one alone could create these numbers in a day.
I've yet to see any of them start posting. On my instance none of them could pass email validation because the emails were fake. I imagine this is true for many instances with a ton of bot sign-ups.
I think just reporting sign-ups as "users" is misleading. The user count on lemmy should reflect only approved/activated accounts, imo.
Damn. Am I bot?
Yay! (Not a bot)
i, for one, welcome our robot overlords.
I'm not a bot I swear
Ah, you see, I've already learned the perfect way to disable all the bots with a single phrase...
THIS STATEMENT IS FALSE!
'beep boop boop bop boop boop beep' Not a a robot S3e49a
My name is Connor. I am the Android sent by Cyberlife.
@Martineski Since you're all new to this place, I'm just hijacking this thread to present you two, very lovely robots - @scream and @catgpt
So about same as Reddit?
Is that an unusually high ratio? Or normal internet stuff?
I heard somewhere that the devs full on removed Captcha from the next release. I hope theres an alternative plan in mind, as I would hate so much to see Lemmy get overrun. It makes me think of the last time I checked USENET; it was almost entirely made up of low-effort cutty paste ads with bad grammar and links to malicious websites. The devs and admins have worked too hard for this system to see tgat happen here and I think all of us want to see it really thrive.
Hahaha love the comments on this thread. You bots are alright
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I have a question, how much can rate limiting along with email verification and captcha ease the situation?
"On the internet, everyone knows you're a cat — and that's totally okay." - toot.cat
We need Blade Runners obviously
“This is the worst kind of discrimination there is: the kind against me!” - Bender Bending Rodríguez
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?Don't be surprised if you are getting flooded with spam bots after removing all the security features against spam bots, human.
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