Lemmy has multiplied it’s number of users (maybe more accurately accounts) in just few days. How much do you think is the percentage of bot accounts? Is Lemmy having problem with bot farming?

    • hare_ware@pawb.social
      61·
      1 year ago

      Active users will probably drop off as the Reddit dust settles, but I’m liking it so far, not really that much of a jarring change once you get past the ActivityPub shananigans.

    • fu@libranet.de
      2·
      1 year ago

      @dessalines @1337tux but if they’re bots they’d still count as active users assuming they aren’t idle.

      In the end, neither really matters, assuming the bots aren’t causing you or your server trouble, like the thousands of posts taghing GNU SOCIAL users repeatedly a couple weeks ago. Could still be happening on instances with absantee admins. (like my original GNU SOCIAL account of @fu@2mb.social)

  • JASN_DE@feddit.de
    1·
    1 year ago

    How much do you think is the percentage of bot accounts?

    …yes.

    Is Lemmy having problem with bot farming?

    Will have one at some point. For not it seems most of them are created, but don’t post anything (yet).

    • 1337tux@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      1 year ago

      Think what will happen when they start to post and comment. They will probably just get defederated.

      Edit: Now that I looked the stats, there’s huge spike in posts and comments.

  • Aninjanameddaryll@outpost.zeuslink.net
    1·
    1 year ago

    There’s obviously bots, but some folks do multiple accounts as default (I do for sure), and others just want to have a bit of padding against instance failure. Others don’t realise you don’t need to have an account on an instance to access it lol.

  • poVoq@slrpnk.net
    1·
    1 year ago

    I think the growth in the last couple of days has been mostly bots.

    l can see a sharp decline in real sign ups on my instance after the initial big wave before and during the 3 day Reddit blackout.

    Maybe there will be another wave early next month but currently it has nearly completely dried up.

    • Hot Saucerman@lemmy.ml
      1·
      1 year ago

      I think this cements worries that some people who are trying to run these servers don’t actually understand the severity of the bot-problem online and aren’t doing enough to protect themselves, not even the basics. It makes you wonder what kind of other basic cybersecurity protections they haven’t set up on their servers, or if their servers are even hardened at all.

      I wonder how much (if any) of this is driven by reddit to create more ambiguity to people’s feelings about the fediverse? It’s totally possible it’s all “organic” bot growth, but if they’re willing to go to the lengths they have against their own users, I also wouldn’t put it past them to be trying to destroy the credibility of any “competitors” in the space.

      • poVoq@slrpnk.net
        1·
        1 year ago

        They are currently dormant, but those thousands of new accounts on some instances clearly show every sign of being auto-generated.

        • rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee
          1·
          1 year ago

          The admins and mods are keeping them at bay, but it could easily get out of control. At this point it’s transparent which it normally is when mods and admins are holding the line, but the soldiers are at the gates.

  • greeen_tomato@feddit.de
    1·
    1 year ago

    I saw some very big instances on fedidb yesterday. I looked at a few… Completely empty instances, no communities, no posts, but 24k users.

    I’m pretty sure those are all bot/spam accounts. So the numbers right now are very inflated imho.

    • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
      1·
      1 year ago

      It certainly didn’t take long to spot servers like that on fedidb! I wonder what is causing people to make those? Load testing? Spam farm? Social experiment to see if people will sign up to an empty instance? Trying to setup an automated simulated social network like people joked reddit was where everyone is a bot except for you?

      I think the most realistic answer is that they’re test instances either by a tech company that believes they have a path to monetize a fediverse project or by some kind of spam farm, but the lack of any posts is still positively weird

      • greeen_tomato@feddit.de
        2·
        1 year ago

        Hah! The idea of an simulated social network sounds weirdly interesting. An idea that just pops into my head would be a (mystery) game based on a lemmy instance, where bots progress the story line and people can participate by finding clues in communities of the instance and triggering the next phase of the story by commenting in the right spots. 🤔

  • Very_Bad_Janet@kbin.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    Have all of the Lemmy instances (and kbin ones, too) now added email requirements, captcha, and maybe the little paragraph asking why you should have an account that Beehaw does?

    Also, how do you identify bot accounts? Can you bulk ban accounts or.do they all have to be examined and dealt with individually?

    ETA: I wasn’t suggesting the paragraph. Just wondering what the instances are putting in to prevent bots. I actually tried to sign up for Beehaw, wrote my little paragraph, and then got the pinwheel of death, lol. I was never able to sign up, but lucked out with a kbin.social account. I have to add that it’s pretty disappointing to be downvoted for simply asking a question. Feels like what I left at Reddit.

    • funkyb@kbin.social
      11·
      1 year ago

      good grief i hope not. Email & captcha are reasonable; a short form essay on why you should be graced with the ability to participate is super cringe.

      • JackFromWisconsin@midwest.socialEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Sounds like it sorts out the right kind of people? I’m not aware of anyone actually asking you to write an essay, no one would do that. 2 short answer questions does not an essay make.

      • rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee
        0·
        1 year ago

        Yeah I was a bit weirded out by that, it’s like what, am I joining a cult? Anyway I actually signed up on a number of instances in search of one I like and only a couple were using an application. The rest were just captcha plus email.

        I think they should come up with a better mechanism than an application. I understand the need to verify a signer is actually a human being, but an application is pretty off-putting. Problem is there’s bots that can get around captcha and email authentication, AI keeps getting smarter.

        • ඞmir@lemmy.ml
          0·
          1 year ago

          “ChatGPT, write me a paragraph about why I want to join an internet forum in first person”

          • Salamander@mander.xyz
            01·
            1 year ago

            It may be an AI, or it can also be a real human that is lying. The point of the application filter is to significantly slow down these approaches to bring their impact to a more manageable level. An automated AI bot will not be able to perform much better than a human troll with some free time because any anomalous registration patterns, including registration spikes and periodicity, are likely to be detected by the much more powerful processor that resides in the admin’s head.

            On the other hand, a catch-all domain e-mail, a VPN with a variable IP, and a captcha-defeating bot can be used to generate thousands of accounts in a very short amount of time. Without the application filter the instance is vulnerable to these high-throughput attacks, and the damage can be difficult to fix.

  • DerWilliWonka@kbin.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    I wonder how people come up with the bot superstition? Just a feeling or is there any valid indication of massive influx of bot accounts?

    • fu@libranet.de
      1·
      1 year ago

      @DerWilliWonka @1337tux yeah, I’m guessing a lot, I didn’t save the post, but I saw earlier this week some instances that were spun up brand new and in less than an hour had >5,000 users.

      One of many reasons to recommend against allowing open sign-up on your instance. A lot htat have been around for longer, like lemmy.ca, require you to request an account, and answer some questions (like why do you want your accoutn on this particularl instance) and a real person clicks the check-mark button.

      Some new users will be annoyed by such, but the truth is if they are annoyed by that, they probably aren’t going to be good fedizens open to following good netiquette anyway.

    • TheAngryBad@kbin.social
      0·
      1 year ago

      Experience, mainly.

      I used to run a phpbb forum, on average the bot signups outnumbered the real people 10 or 20 times. And that was with some fairly robust anti spam measures in place - something I think this platform is too new to have properly sorted out yet.

      I may be wrong, I don’t know how the back end here works, but any place where people can post publicly will be infested with bot signups very quickly. The only real variable is how good the anti spam measures are.