From 3000 daily active users on June 1, 2023 to 47500 on June 26, 2023.
According to Lemmy’s documentation, “An active user is someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame.”
Sources:
- https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=30
- https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html
EDIT: check out this link for a list of lemmy apps: https://lemmy.world/post/465785
Yeah, it’s absolutely disappointing and gross. Bots have been actively probing for obscure instances without registration validation and flocking to them. Good thing the top real lemmy instances (like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, sh.itjust.works, lemmy.ca) have been much more vigilant about that.
Which is a shame, because in theory it seems like creating a self-hosted instance for your personal account has a lot of advantages (not worrying about the host doing something screwy or abandoning the instance, having full control over who you federate with, being able to customize the interface, etc.)
But that may end up going the way of self-hosted email servers, where differentiating yourself from a spam server becomes impossible and everyone ends up on the equivalent of gmail.
Are those instances defederating from the bot-filled ones?
Yeah, those instances are defederating from the bot-filled ones, but new ones are still popping up (although seems to be slowing down a little for now).
I hope there’s some way to block that, bots are useful or funny sometimes (like the ones to download videos, reminders, etc). But I asume most of them have the sole purpose of advertising or brigading.
I can’t wrap my head about Lemmy 0.18 dropping capchas.
deleted by creator
What’s your take on it?
My (different person here) take is it’s probing behavior. Who benefits? Anti-reddit-protest trolls want to see this fail, and some could have the resources. Savvy criminal organizations see potential profit. Major tech companies see at least a research opportunity at minimal expense. White hats want to find and raise awareness of vulnerabilities.
Only governments would really have no major motive beyond the usual surveillance of a social space. So I think the question should really be, who’s not doing it? Because if people aren’t wholesale fucking around yet, they’ll start very soon. It’s only the savvy or lucky that are aware of us still, but that will not be true for long. Snowball is rolling now, that’s pretty plain to see.
I mean, we’re just a big and growing pile of consumers. What else do you do with those?
If we have the ability to identify them or where they’re coming from, could our various platforms just defederate or block the ones who aren’t dealing with the bot problem down the line?