From 3000 daily active users on June 1, 2023 to 47500 on June 26, 2023.
According to Lemmy’s documentation, “An active user is someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame.”
Sources:
- https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=30
- https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html
EDIT: check out this link for a list of lemmy apps: https://lemmy.world/post/465785
this keeps getting touted but isn’t it a huge number of bots causing the rise?
Bots have inflated the total users count (around 2.4 million), but they aren’t active (yet). So for now active users is a recommended way to measure the fediverse. But once bots start posting, we’ll have to find another way to track real user activity.
This is just really disappointing and gross. Is there any way to not have bots absolutely everywhere?
Yeah, it’s absolutely disappointing and gross. Bots have been actively probing for obscure instances without registration validation and flocking to them. Good thing the top real lemmy instances (like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, sh.itjust.works, lemmy.ca) have been much more vigilant about that.
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What’s your take on it?
My (different person here) take is it’s probing behavior. Who benefits? Anti-reddit-protest trolls want to see this fail, and some could have the resources. Savvy criminal organizations see potential profit. Major tech companies see at least a research opportunity at minimal expense. White hats want to find and raise awareness of vulnerabilities.
Only governments would really have no major motive beyond the usual surveillance of a social space. So I think the question should really be, who’s not doing it? Because if people aren’t wholesale fucking around yet, they’ll start very soon. It’s only the savvy or lucky that are aware of us still, but that will not be true for long. Snowball is rolling now, that’s pretty plain to see.
I mean, we’re just a big and growing pile of consumers. What else do you do with those?
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Which is a shame, because in theory it seems like creating a self-hosted instance for your personal account has a lot of advantages (not worrying about the host doing something screwy or abandoning the instance, having full control over who you federate with, being able to customize the interface, etc.)
But that may end up going the way of self-hosted email servers, where differentiating yourself from a spam server becomes impossible and everyone ends up on the equivalent of gmail.
Are those instances defederating from the bot-filled ones?
Yeah, those instances are defederating from the bot-filled ones, but new ones are still popping up (although seems to be slowing down a little for now).
I hope there’s some way to block that, bots are useful or funny sometimes (like the ones to download videos, reminders, etc). But I asume most of them have the sole purpose of advertising or brigading.
I can’t wrap my head about Lemmy 0.18 dropping capchas.
If we have the ability to identify them or where they’re coming from, could our various platforms just defederate or block the ones who aren’t dealing with the bot problem down the line?
I don’t see how that could be done, the bot owners can always just spin up their own new instance where they control sign up requirements.
Other instances can then defederate from the spam instance but they can quickly spin up a new one.
Gonna be interesting to see how it’s solved.
Require that membership in the Fediverse be approved?
The fediverse is decentralized, anyone can start their own lemmy/kbin/mastodon/whatever server and make an account they just approve themselves.
If you mean some kind of global approval then that destroys the whole point of the fediverse.
Just throwing out ideas.
If the Fediverse cannot control the bots then where does that leave actual users?
This is going to be the real skynet fight.
wait how did we conclude that the bots aren’t active yet?
Because people have been monitoring bot infected instances and have not seen them post or comment (yet).
My understanding is that’s causing the rise in accounts (2.5m!) not the active accounts data
Everyone online is a bot except you.
Beep boop
He’s one of 'em! Shoot!
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If they’re like NewsUser and Botittest, the bots will flood this place when they start. Even though these two good bots have made this place a lot more usable, it feels like that’s what the “All” thread has become. Just news.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the news feed, but now I understand why it became a separate thread in Reddit.
Whichever the instances that lowered their guard were, there will be a day they will have to be defederated. It’ll be a test for this place, for sure.
Same boat as you. It was your comment that made me realize the one filling my feed with nothing but news was all only linkbot and when I blocked it out of curiosity, I could see memes and user posts again. It was posting so often it was literally drowning out every other subject.
I think it’s nice to keep up with news on a platform that doesn’t seem so US-centric and full of vitriol, and I’ll be sad to see it go. Might turn the block on and off. But I’m already subbed to a news community.
Dumb question (new to Lemmy) but how does one block bots from feed? Isn’t that up to the community the post originated from?
I already blocked Lemmit from appearing on my feed, but there should be an option to block posts from certain instances from appearing in your feed at all. I really hope we get to fight the bot problem without losing the advantages of federation.
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