• imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      For the curious but lazy: Lemmy is currently at 55k monthly active users and kbin is also around 55k MAU. The bot accounts are just noise but we are seeing consistent, steady growth so far.

      • hardypart@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Lemmy + kbin had around 2k more active users each day over the past 10 days. Today, after the 3rd party app exitus, it were 10k more. It’s fantastic!

        Source.

      • TheGreenGolem@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Something is off with kbin’s active user reporting. Look at the numbers: their total user and active user numbers are exactly the same. There is no way that every single one of the users are active.

        • Tiff@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          As I said in another comment. The captcha system was dependent on websockets, and exactly what the Devs have said, the captcha system was easy to break. I’m sure my old OCR python 2 code could have broken it.

          So when we ditched the inefficient websocket system the captcha system stopped working

      • Artemis@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        What is the theory around the prevalence of bots? Is it people trying to snatch up desirable names or what?

        • Tiff@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          Who knows. They are not even good names, the usernames are usually part of the email. It’s usually super easy to figure out. Captcha’s were dependent on web sockets, so once the Devs got rid of those the captchas broke anyway.

          Tinfoil hat mode With enough accounts you could influence the algorithm by voting up content you want vs content you don’t want. Or basically DDoS servers. As every like on a post for a community is sent to every other instance that federates with that community.

          Or it could be people creating accounts to inflate the numbers of the fediverse to write this content and make silly headlines like these.

        • Acetamide@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I think most of the bots at the moment don’t have any real purpose other than showing that it is possible to create so many bots. Gathering from posts on the subject and the modlog, many bots have far from a natural name in the form of [random word][long number]. I suspect many of these hots have been created by the same person and/or script.

          It will be a matter of time though before real problems start occuring if the sign up process does not become more secure. Fortunately, several pull requests exist for this at the Lemmy GitHub.

    • kersploosh@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      It’s hard to tell exactly, but probably the vast majority of them.

      The graphs at The Federation are wild. Total Users spiked to nearly 2M a few days ago then collapsed to about 1M today. The Active Users charts did the same thing. And both numbers are still falling sharply.

      Edit: Something must be going on with that site. I checked a few hours later and the graphs are very different.