Lemmy & Kbin reaching 100k active users within days.
FediDB - Fediverse Network Statistics
Looking at Fedidb.org the Fediverse Network Statistics, I'm seeing about 98,000 Active users as of the 27th. That's at least 50k new users this month. Welcome to Lemmy, fellow migrants!
Curious if it will explode in a few days. I know I'm ready to accept new users and help educate where I can.
What we need is a much better landing page for join-lemmy.org because I was utterly confused about it. Initially I thought these were all independant instances not sharing information (federation).
I get that this is about Active Users but should we/the fediverse be concerned about the sheer number of bot accounts being created on brand new, questionable instances?
To tell if we should be concerned about bots is a difficult task. To make a decision, here's some things we should consider:
Some bots can even be helpful, like if they were to repost content that we like to know about. But yeah, it can also put things on unequal footing like person A doesn't like person B so makes 50 bot accounts that downvote them everywhere they go and no matter what they say. Then again, a group of 50 people could also accomplish that without bots, or like 5 people each with 10 alt accounts (but like, otherwise normal & active). Also, someone could spin up their own personal instance and join the federation and infiltrate the entire network that way (I mean in a way that even an instance admin could do nothing about, b/c they are the admin for it). As the federation grows, I expect to see full-on brigading, and infiltrations, and yes even Russian trolls.
Then again, there's an important difference: Reddit has 2000 employees and can barely hold that website together - most of them have got to be like public relations, advertising, accountants, HR, interns and the like - whereas the Lemmy/kbin codebase is open source, so we can expect to see contributions from people who care and are knowledgeable, much as Reddit had mods who did the same, tirelessly devoting hours of their weeks (often per day even) to improving the place. Now that Rexit happened / is happening, expect to see the pace of improvements to increase. :-)
There are tons of ways - e.g. is there an account that has existed for a whole day and the only thing it has ever done is downvote posts? That's a bot. Perhaps similarly for up-voters, although lurkers exist so perhaps only question those with a captcha rather than straight-up remove. If such measures remove the easiest-to-detect bot spammers, then it would be too exhausting for one person to have like 1000 bot accounts - they'd have to do nothing but make posts all day long just to keep them alive! - thus it would limit their influence.
What can they do about it?
Well I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea of federation but initially I imagine an instance could just not federate with an instance that doesn't use captcha/email verification during signup but my confusion is wondering if like there is a transitive trust in the fediverse. Like Lemmy.1 trusts Lemmy.2 and Lemmy.1 does not trust lemmy.3 but Lemmy.2 DOES trust lemmy.3... can bots from Lemmy.3 post on Lemmy.2 which will then be federated to Lemmy.1? Sorry, that seems super confusing as I type it out but it's the best way I can describe it.
How many are bots though? Instances should be required to have captcha when making accounts to curb bots.
Bots inflated the total number of users, but they're not active yet, that's why the active users statistics is mostly true.
They’re active accounts so the vast majority are humans.
Also seems like Dansup is finding a lot of spam accounts on lemmy instances too. He manages the fedidb of all the fediverse software and platforms with various metrics
Good for them.
I'm pretty content with KBin. As time goes on the content level will increase and hopefully remain at a level which makes it easy to curate my feed and reduce noise. Truth be told Reddit has been getting worse for a long time and being here reflects that. This feels a lot like what Reddit felt like 10 years ago.
I like kbin but I'm hoping to find a fast way to filter out all of the German subs. I have absolutely no issue with them, I just can't understand the content so it's useless to me. It seems to take up about half of my feed
Man what is the deal with us Germans and this place? Feels like I'm invading by accident. Well, old habits...
You can click the cancel icon besides the subscribe button in any magazine to stop them being shown to you
I play this game where I try to understand the ichiel memes. I usually get close. Some of them are hilarious.
Plus it goes the other way. If someone only knows German, the English will be a much-worse flood.
Probably needs a PR to add a per-user language filtering setting. Probably a good idea to permit multiple options for multilingual users. I don't believe that it exists today, though clearly the metadata required to do the filtering is available.
I’m actually hoping that at some point we may have an automatic translation for content not in our chosen language. The way Mastodon does. I want to understand what the threads and comments in other languages are saying! I feel like it broadens understanding.
It's cool to see what other cultures are talking about, for me the other languages posts are a plus.
I mean we can set the language of posts, cant you filter by the language (yet)?
Well, one more thing for the to do list, because yeah, that's obviously useful
I just block them
I 99% agree with you, but I remember Reddit 10 years ago. For me, this feels like what I would have imagined Reddit felt like a couple years before I joined, 13 years ago.