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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
I think this happen to reddit, but really. It become so preoccupied with same way of thinking and never any tolerance or interest in other opinion it was scary.
Bots are a fight we will have upon us and coordinated effort will be (is) necessary.
We will have to follow paterns known human users have, and patterns bots have and at least one line of defense should be made from there.
I am thinking of key signing parties, so that we organically confirm known humans and trust in that data more when training our algorithms for bot detections. Maybe even pur own bots for detecting bots, all this tools go both ways, we can use them too.