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.
Per my original post from three weeks ago, I’m using a coarse method to identify (and try to draw the admins’ attention to) a particular pool of accounts that were created in a specific week on a handful of instances. Actively spamming bot accounts, and bot accounts on other instances, won’t be caught with my method. I’m not being thorough, just looking for low-hanging fruit.
It is possible that some legitimate users’ lurking accounts got swept up and deleted, but I think that’s very unlikely. If an instance suddenly goes from 3 users to 60,000 users in a week, then the growth abruptly stops and none of those new users show activity, that’s suspicious. If there are real people in that wave of accounts then at least a few of them should be posting or commenting, and more people should continue opening accounts over time.
Do you have any idea what these accounts are doing?
If those accounts aren’t doing anything detectable (spamming, etc), what’s the problem with their existence?
There’s no problem with them at the moment. The concern is that they may be bot accounts that will be activated at some point in the future for malicious use: spamming, spewing politically charged garbage, mass upvoting/downvoting of certain content, etc.