Here you can see 2 day old post warning about the danger of not using email/captcha verification: https://lemmy.ml/post/1345031

And here are stats of lemmy platform where it shows that we gained 200 000 lemmy users in 2 days: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats

Another tracking site with the same explosion in users: https://the-federation.info/platform/73

What do you think? Is it some sort of a bug or do people run bot farms?

Edit2: It’s been now 3 days and we went from 150 000 user accounts 3 days ago to 700 000 user accounts today making it 550 000+ bot accounts and counting. Almost 80% accounts on lemmy are now bots and it may end up being an very serious issue for lemmy platform once they become active.

Edit3: It’s now 4th day of the attack and the amount of accounts on lemmy has almost reached 1 200 000. Almost 90% of total userbase are now bots.

Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

  • FrostBolt@kbin.social
    6·
    1 year ago

    What I wonder is: what’s the motivation for these bot network attackers? Is it some script kiddie doing it for lulz? A reddit “nationalist”? Russia and China getting an early start on propaganda tools for the newer platforms?

    • dustin@kbin.social
      12·
      1 year ago

      My guess is they’ll be used to upvote/downvote things that the botnet operators are paid to promote/suppress. SEO for the fediverse basically

      • daguito81@waveform.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        Also, if it’s easy to do it makes sense to have a bunch of accounts as assets in a nascent platform. If lemmy does take off, you already have a bunch of bot accounts to sell advertising/propaganda. Whereas if you wait until later it might be harder or more expe sjve to generate those accounts.

    • Martineski@lemmy.fmhy.mlOP
      2·
      1 year ago

      Let’s hope that it’s just trolling and bots won’t be put into use. I hope owners will mass delete them later because as long they exist they will be a risk for the rest of the platform.