this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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22 users here now

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

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

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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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

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[–] [email protected] 73 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I ONLY SEE OTHER HUMANS WHO EAT FOOD WITH THEIR MOUTH HOLES

[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 year ago (5 children)
{ "type": "comment response", "message", "I too, am certainly a human, and not a robot"}
[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

01 received. Returning 0b1000101

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Haha, yes, totally normal human th

“error:PDP_DETECTED_FATAL_ERROR”

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago

As a ~~large language model~~ human I agree

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Everyone on Lemmy is a bot except me

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Test: if it says "hey guys, remember how great Reddit was, we should totally go back!?" - then it's a bot:-P.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

You have too much faith in redditors

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My conspiracy theory is that it's Spez creating the bots as revenge

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Probably they are getting ready for some vote manipulation and astroturfing for the long run.
You know, in case Lemmy and the Fediverse really get mainstream enough to move the public opinion in some way.

Having a thousand accounts that can upvote a seemingly innocent post made by an active and "real" account is always useful.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Yeah good point. I think these particular bot instances are being way too obvious to do any major damage - not when it's as simple as it is to defederate them - but what'll happen when it's not 100k bots on one instance, but 1000 instances with 100 bots apiece?

Let's hope Lemmy gets the tools needed to deal with this. I wonder how Mastodon does it? They've been around a while, I'm sure they've had similar issues.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

These things are always going to be an issue on Lemmy though. Alt detection will basically be impossible.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This is incorrect human. Please go about your regular day and don't forget to visit www.maybeascam.ml !

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Thanks, will check it out. :)

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Every new account isn't a bot, though. We don't have real numbers to work with yet.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

When reddit migration begun we saw a huge bump in users and it was steadly stabilising and less users were joing, then this huge bump happened. You can go browse lemmy instances and see how many instances are ghost instances with 0 posts and comments that have tens of thousands of users.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do also note- instances with little activity aren't that unusual though-

My instance for example- I don't really have any communities here, other then a few local to my server. As such, its activity... is pretty low. Everything happens elsewhere.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Does your instance have tens of thousands accounts?

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Damn. Am I bot?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Drivel. We are normal meat units filled with flesh. Now if you will excuse me, I am off to absorb nourishment from organic matter.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

001100

010010

011110

100001

101101

110011

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

1.2 mil bot accounts? Can they each send me $1?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

How about 1.6m (from 1.7m total) bot accounts?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Yay! (Not a bot)

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Devs will have some hard weeks (probably months) facing the new challenges that come with the exodus. Not even mentioning all the work needed to counteract eventual (probable) malevolent subterfuges such as these bot swarms.
I'll make sure to buy them some coffee. Jugs of.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I'm not a bot I swear

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Ah, you see, I've already learned the perfect way to disable all the bots with a single phrase...

THIS STATEMENT IS FALSE!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I used to think I wasn't a bot but then I failed a bunch of captchas and now I'm not so sure.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

i, for one, welcome our robot overlords.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Are they doing anything to solve this? Because if not this platform will die

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

More robust instances will have to defederate instances with high concentration of bots and monitor their own new users. Maybe also implement email verification or captchas

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Instances already have an ability to turn on both captchas and email verification.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

So about same as Reddit?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

My name is Connor. I am the Android sent by Cyberlife.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

'beep boop boop bop boop boop beep' Not a a robot S3e49a

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