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Pushing back against the wave of bot accounts on Lemmy - sh.itjust.works
sh.itjust.worksHi everyone. I wanted to share some Lemmy-related activism I’ve been up to. I
got really interested in the apparent surge of bot accounts that happened in
June. Recently, I was able to play a small part in removing some of them.
Hopefully by getting the word out we can ensure Lemmy is a place for actual
human users and not legions of spam bots. First some background. This won’t be
new to many of you, but I’ll include it anyway. During the week of June 18 to
June 25, as the Reddit migration to Lemmy was in full swing, there was a surge
of suspicious account creation on Lemmy instances that had open registration and
no captcha or email verification. Hundreds of thousands of accounts appeared and
then sat inactive. We can only guess what they’re for, but I assume they are
being planted for future malicious use (spamming ads, subversive electioneering,
influencing upvotes to drive content to our front pages, etc.) If you look at
the stats on The Federation [https://the-federation.info/platform/73] you might
notice that even the shape of the Total Users graphs are the same across many
instances. User numbers ramped up on June 18, grew almost linearly throughout
the week, and peaked on June 24. (I’m puzzled by the slight drop at the end. I
assume it’s due to some smoothing or rate-sensitive averaging that The
Federation uses for the graphs?) Here are total user graphs for a few
representative instances showing the typical shape:
[https://pxscdn.com/public/m/_v2/575908252155290820/bf0f52ff2-92677b/QIsf6O7xJ7DF/RuLbXECOAsUNv4Xdo02p9fMvzeNEezEqEfG5IYeE.jpg]
Clearly this is suspicious, and I wasn’t the only one to notice. Lemmy.ninja
documented how they discovered and removed suspicious accounts from this time
period: (https://lemmy.ninja/post/30492 [https://lemmy.ninja/post/30492]).
Several other posts detailed how admins were trying to purge suspicious
accounts. From June 24 to June 30 The Federation showed a drop in the total
number of Lemmy users from 1,822,313 to 1,589,412. That’s 232,901 suspicious
accounts removed! Great success! Right? Well, no, not yet. There are still
dozens of instances with wildly suspicious user numbers. I took data from The
Federation and compared total users to active users on all listed instances. The
instances in the screenshot below collectively have 1.22 million accounts but
only 46 active users. These look like small self-hosted instances that have been
infected by swarms of bot accounts.
[https://pxscdn.com/public/m/_v2/575908252155290820/bf0f52ff2-92677b/x8ZN2HzPp8qG/QGCcBeeiWZGWTFDILmi1snKwwDm4DrbUlyuJJaH0.jpg]
As of this writing The Federation shows approximately 1.9 million total Lemmy
accounts. That means the majority of all Lemmy accounts are sitting dormant on
these instances, potentially to be used for future abuse. This bothers me. I
want Lemmy to be a place where actual humans interact. I don’t want it to become
another cesspool of spam bots and manipulative shenanigans. The internet has
enough places like that already. So, after stewing on it for a few days, I
decided to do something. I started messaging admins at some of these instances,
pointing out their odd account numbers and referencing the lemmy.ninja post
above. I suggested they consider removing the suspicious accounts. Then I
waited. And they responded! Some admins were simply unaware of their inflated
user counts. Some had noticed but assumed it was a bug causing Lemmy to report
an incorrect number. Others weren’t sure how to purge the suspicious accounts
without nuking their instances and starting over. In any case, several instance
admins checked their databases, agreed the accounts were suspicious, and managed
to delete them. I’m told that the lemmy.ninja post was very helpful. Check out
these early results!
[https://pixelfed.social/storage/m/_v2/575908252155290820/bf0f52ff2-92677b/jOO4ViuomfYn/y7fF4bjEaLB2p6ViC89h9qZZaKTSLUmHC3bTmDVv.jpg]
Awesome! Another 144k suspicious accounts are gone. A few other admins have said
they are working on doing the same on their instances. I plan to message the
admins at all the instances where the total accounts to active users ratio is
above 10,000. Maybe, just maybe, scrubbing these suspected bot accounts will
reduce future abuse and prevent this place from becoming the next internet
cesspool. That’s all for now. Thanks for reading! Also, special thanks to the
following people: @RotaryKeyboard@lemmy.ninja
[https://lemmy.ninja/u/RotaryKeyboard] for your helpful post!
@brightside@demotheque.com [https://demotheque.com/u/brightside],
@davidisgreat@lemmy.sedimentarymountains.com
[https://lemmy.sedimentarymountains.com/u/davidisgreat], and
@SoupCanDrew@lemmy.fyi [https://lemmy.fyi/u/SoupCanDrew] for being so quick to
take action on your instances!
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Thank you for doing this awesome job which will help creating a meaningful place for people to interact!