In just 3 days more than 500.000 new users!! Lemmy for power, we will be legion, expect us!
The question is: what percentage of those users are bots? And does it matter?
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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The way I've heard of things in federated instances, if one instance becomes bot filled and toxic, then other instances will unfederate them. It makes it worthwhile for mods of that instance to run a healthy server.
There's a bot running on one instance now that identifies itself as such and is reposting content from reddit with links going to the original article. These sorts of bots I can accept.
It matters because it means which Lemmy is growing exponentially! Ofc some of those users would be bots, but I highly doubt a lot of them.
There are instances with over 9k accounts and like 5 posts. There's a lot of bots.
Hope the staff works to solve this.
The problem is that there is no "the staff" as such. The developers can add tools, but if people want bot instances, there will be bot instances. The instance administrators can just not federate with them (which makes the most sense to me) but that will be on an instance by instance basis.
I understand, thank you. Then of that way how possible avoid that Lemmy.world for example would filled with bots.
Well Lemmy.worlsld can defederate with the bit instances. That won't affect any other instance though.
As far as bots making accounts on Lemmy.world, they've added a captcha which helps a lot.
I hope we'll get some improved moderating tools that help eventually as well.
The reason it is likely a lot of bot accounts is someone explained how to exploit a glitch that creates thousands of bot accounts within minutes. The day after they posted the exploit, suddenly Lemmy started growing rapidly. It’s just too coincidental to not be mostly bots
Most of them are bots, I estimate around 200k real users
I agree, based on these statistics. Prior to the obvious jump in bot-farmed accounts, there were about 162000 active users with an active user proportion of about 0.186 (somewhere around >29000 active users).
Now there are 649k lemmy users and an active user proportion of 0.055 (~35600 according to the dashboard). If we assume those 35600 users represent the pre-bot-farming ratio of 0.186, we get 35600/0.186 or about just over 191000.
That's still an increase of probably 30k true users, unless the proportion of lurkers have also suddenly drastically increased. I don't think that's true, because, pre-bot-farming, when the user base started growing with the Reddit debacle, the proportion of active users increased accordingly. I assume that's because new users are excited to help grow the community.
Still, in the past two days alone active users went up by over 5k (15%). Maybe that'll continue exponentially, and there'll be 95k (500k total non-bot) users two weeks from now, or maybe it'll continue linearly and there'll be 70k (~385k) users.
I don't know why I spent so long thinking about this.
I don't know why you did it, but you reminded me of r/theydidthemath https://lemmy.world/post/387357
Ha! :D Honored to be the inaugurating post of that community
I would bet the newer users form reddit are not quite as active as the older users, so it's probably a little bit better than that, but in the ballpark.
Sad fact. Hope staff solve that thing.
Besides from the user count. Does it feel more active lately? That's a more important question imo.
To me it feels slightly more active than when I joined 9 days ago. I think this is as much to improved organization regarding communities as much as new users. But the growth hasn't been incredibly.
I guess we'll have to give time to adapt. The fediverse altogether is having a big shakeup. I guess when people starts to find themselves at home they'll get to interact more.
I feel it more active for sure. Not a lot, but it will get there
You're right, slightly more active than 10 days.
700k total users but the most votes ive seen on a post this week is like 1k
Bots will ruin the fediverse just like they ruin everything else, thats the true inevitability.
Typically only a very small percentage of total users actually interact/comment/vote on content.
I don't know if I've seen a community/magazine with even 10k subscribers yet - so 1k votes is pretty incredible participation.
I saw a post pointing out that one of the Star Trek subs hit 10k, so it's still relatively rare, at least.
Going to need de-federate all these instances that are pure bots signing up on them. lemmy.k6qw.com is top user base on https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list and has no actually community's.
I wish my bank account grew like this graph! Sadly, it’s the reverse
Hahaha facts lmao 😂😂
I'm curious to see where this is going