this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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That's actually really interesting. What's the purpose of so many inactive accounts at once?
Seems to be enough to have a few of them, and not a million accounts since it clearly will rise suspicion... :)
Very good that you found them. Fascinating.
Maybe an attempt to try and make the fediverse look more active than it was back then, to get headlines about how it has explosive growth etc. It was June and everything really took off then.
That really is the million dollar question. I don't know. My fear is that they were intended to sit unnoticed until someone had a malicious use for them. Maybe to mass upvote/downvote certain content to make it more visible. Or to become active at an opportune time to make divisive posts and comments. I saw many accounts like that on Reddit; they show no activity for years and then suddenly come alive and spew garbage. I'm sure we'll see some of that on Lemmy next year since there will be a major election in the US. Though hopefully less since a bunch of suspicious dormant accounts are now gone.
It's a smart move for a spammer to create a lot of accounts in the early days of a platform, before more restrictive signups with mail verification, phone verification or captchas are in place. Look at how difficult it has become to register on Twitter or Facebook.
Perhaps something akin to this, sleeper cells for some nefarious purpose, e.g. influencing elections.
Could be as simple as reserving popular usernames too.
You can still do that in your own instance.
I’ve got a couple accounts on various instances as backup, since we can’t exactly transfer accounts across instances just yet.