Lemmy

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

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

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~~Almost~~ OVER 90% of the accounts on lemmy are now bot accounts!! (lemmy.fmhy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

(page 3) 50 comments

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I heard somewhere that the devs full on removed Captcha from the next release. I hope theres an alternative plan in mind, as I would hate so much to see Lemmy get overrun. It makes me think of the last time I checked USENET; it was almost entirely made up of low-effort cutty paste ads with bad grammar and links to malicious websites. The devs and admins have worked too hard for this system to see tgat happen here and I think all of us want to see it really thrive.

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

yeah this isn't good. they're gonna have to do something about this asap before all those bots come alive and effective dos the site out of existance

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

DDoS usually cost money to run, Lemmy/Kbin are small potatos with no cash to ransom, so there’s not really a point except to troll, in which case users can just spin up more servers and push back on the attacker’s cost/impact.

I do get the sense it would be relatively easy to DoS Lemmy, it doesn’t seem very efficient.

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

When I first joined the Fediverse I saw a decent amount of people saying that they didn't want kbin/lemmy to have email verification. Is this what they wanted? Fake growth?

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

"On the internet, everyone knows you're a cat — and that's totally okay." - toot.cat

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

Everyone on Lemmy is a bot except you.