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?

  • DerWilliWonka@kbin.social
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    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?

    • greensky@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      I think it’s a combination of things. There are real users who have migrated to Lemmy because of reddit’s horrible treatment of its users and there are also bots being created but that’s normal on the internet.

    • fu@libranet.de
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      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
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      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.

      • DerWilliWonka@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        What is something someone can gain by swarming an instance or forums like yours with bots? I cant wrap my head around it. Also if someone has an instance and swarms it with bot accounts, it may seem like you got a popular instance but where is the revenue if there are noone who is able to click an ad? Do they do it just for the lols?

        • GizmoLion@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Spin up 50 bots.
          Sign them all up for lemmy.
          Let accounts interact/age.
          Sell accounts to companies who want to advertise as one of the cool kids.

          Happened on reddit nonstop.

        • TheAngryBad@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          In my particular case (as was the case with most forums in the day), it was really just about spamming boards with links to whatever shitty ED pills or crypto scam they were trying to sell.

          They were never really sophisticated, but never really had to be either. A spammer could spend a few minutes writing a script for a bot to crawl the web looking for phpbb signup pages, then try to create an account on any it could find and immediately post the links. They could post hundreds of links on dozens of different forums with just a few minutes work - and then do it all again tomorrow with a bunch of new signups.

        • fu@libranet.de
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          1 year ago

          @DerWilliWonka @1337tux @TheAngryBad there are cetainly some who do it for the lulz, and there are some who probably do it as a way to encourage others to make security changes to the platform. Personally, I think it would be more useful to file issues via git, but what do I know, I’m just an old-timer who quit college after failing security class, and thereby losing my scholarship.

    • Overzeetop@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I asked the same question. The answer is that there are a bunch of instances (probably 15-20) which have thousands or tens of thousands of new accounts (<1 week old) but have barely dozens of posts. Here’s a sheet made by @sunaurus showing the effect. A bunch of the explosion is in open signup (no email, no captcha, no verification) and there is zero interaction on the instance. Could we be seeing half a million lurkers on instances with <200 comments combined between them in the last couple of days? I suppose it’s possible, but it seems unlikely.