- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/1823812
This is an update to my previous post about suspicious inactive accounts on a handful of instances: (https://sh.itjust.works/post/998307).
I ended up messaging the admins at the 16 instances show in the attached image. I pointed out their wild user numbers, and referenced the lemmy.ninja post detailing how that instance scrubbed suspicious accounts from their user database.
6 admins responded. They had all noticed the odd accounts and either thought the numbers were wrong, or weren’t sure how to purge the suspicious accounts without nuking their databases. In the end they managed to delete a combined total of about 338k dormant accounts from their instances. (One of the instances seems to have gone down since then.)
I never received a reply from the other 10 instance admins, though 8 of those 10 instances appear to be down (as of 27 July 2023). 2 instances are still up and unchanged.
Between the actively removed accounts and the downed instances, this represents a loss of 930,004 inactive Lemmy accounts!
You can see the drop in the graphs on The Federation. The total number of Lemmy accounts has been cut in half over the past 3 weeks, from a peak of 2.18M to today’s 1.09M. The change is mostly from these 16 instances.
I have to admit, I did not expect such a large change when I started this! Hopefully this bodes well for Lemmy’s future as a place where actual humans interact, rather than a cesspool of automated comments and upvote/downvote brigading.
That’s all I have for now. Keep your stick on the ice; we’re all in this together.
Great to see the transparency with which this is handled
The transparency may be my very favorite part of Lemmy. It’s almost feels like these people are invested in it’s success instead of it’s profit.
It’s a very early internet mindset where success == profit.
Open source vs we’re a business mentality
Early internet grassroots collaboration stuff.
Those are crazy numbers… WTF?
If that’s is the reality for Lemmy, I couldn’t imagine the number of bots giants social networks have. Crazy.
Thank you for your work.
That’s the thing, right? Those giant networks’ admins surely know how inflated their userbase is. They surely know that a lot of the activity is bot faked/manipulated.
But since the end goal of those networks is generate traffic to sell something (ads, user data), they never purge the bots. They need fake engagement. They might even promote it. The human user is just being used (Cf. Stallman’s use of this term).
I work on a team that runs the web presence for a very large international music label and we postulate that 75-80% of all traffic we do at any time is bots, crawlers, and security scans. With caching in place most of the time our system hums along quite happy. It’s only when we get an influx of ACTUAL people do things go south. [Max database connections, firewall usage pegs and stops responding, edge nginx process OOMs itself, ect.]
Well, thanks for being part of the problem.
I want to celebrate two things. 1. Your awareness of the potential dangers looming over the fediverse. 2. Your proactive attitude curtailing the problem at its root. From one human to another, thank you!
Very nice, let’s try to keep this place as clean as possible
Thank you for your work!
Thank you for your efforts to keep this place clean and civil, and especially for the transparency in describing how you’ve dealt with such annoyances. You have my respect.
You have my sword.
And my ass!
Are you really a bot?
No that’s been my nickname for 15 years
Cool!
Sounds like something a bot would say.
If the women don’t find you handsome, they’ll at least find you handy.
- Red Green
Found the Canadian eh?
WOOO!
Thanks for keeping Lemmy healthy. ❤️
actual humans interact, rather than a cesspool of automated comments and upvote/downvote brigading.
Thank you! That’s why I left the other place. You’re doing God’s work, anon.
Amazing and thank you!
Unfortunately no website is safe from the cancer of AI/bots. The Internet is truly in trouble.
I don’t think I’ve ever upvoted something more enthusiastically in my life.
Cheers and thank you.
Suggestion: what if there was a lemmy instance solely for reporting malicious lemmy/fediverse servers? I’ve read some stuff about FBI crackdown and mastodon instances containing questionable material. Wouldn’t it be gret to have some kind of federated “registry” of all the bad actors out there? I am pretty clueless, but would that help?
Might work. Like a lemmy admin coordination hub instance? On mastodon there is “fediblock,” which is what you’re describing.
I do know that there is lemmyadmin.site currently, but it’s not extremely active as far as I can tell.
Why would you need a lemmy instance for that? A web site would be better.
Awesome work, and thank you for all of this it is appreciated!
Thank you for your service. o7