cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/358415
The vast majority of the instances in that screenshot have known jumps from 1~50 users to tens of thousands in less than a day. These instances also happen to not require a captcha on sign up.
It may very well be that instance owners are innocent as some have really been victims of bot attacks and simply forgot that you could enable captchas for sign-ups, nevertheless I think instance directories like Lemmyverse.net should start disincentivizing anyone from inflating his own instance with tens of thousands of bots in order to get on top of those “leaderboards”.
What incentive is there to have a ton of users registered to a particular instance?
The larger instances get featured on websites like lemmyverse.net and get more visibility. The owners of those instances can then get free traffic which they can redirect wherever they want.
Redirect to what tho? They gonna redirect me to Amazon? Pornhub? Malware?
Crypto scams, viagra or literally anything they want to advertise. Same reason blog comments spamming is a thing.
And 99% of those people are just gonna click that X and stop going to the site that redirects them. If it’s not a Lemmy instance they are getting to, then what would make them stick around?
The blame should be more on the sites like lemmyverse.net for not vetting the links they are advertising.
then what would make them stick around?
The goal of spam has never been to have visitors who stick around
The blame should be more on the sites like lemmyverse.net for not vetting the links they are advertising.
Yes, and this is exactly the point of the thread.
Okay sorry, I misunderstood the post then. I thought you were blaming the instances that were inflating their numbers.
Yeah no, I wasn’t pointing fingers at anyone. I was just pointing out that the very existence of websites like lemmyverse.net which feature large instances are implicitly encouraging instance owners, in this case particularly bad actors, to inflate their numbers. It also hurts the Fediverse as a whole as new visitors will see a bunch of spammy looking instances featured on those websites.
A clever scammer could create scam/phishing/advertisement posts on their instance that are artificially upvoted to the top. They could even have ChatGPT make a bunch of comments to make them seem real.
Hopefully, other instances would catch on and defederate from them, but if they’re subtle or just wait until they have a bunch of users it would probably be enough to scam quite a few people.
That is something that could certainly happen. Sounds like a major problem with all of Fediverse? The CEOs of AI say it’s not ready but they keep selling it anyway and we just have to deal with the fallout.
How would you expect moderation to be applied to lemmyverse, then? Remove all communities with >5000 members?
I was imagining just checking the homepage.
So they can scam and spam people effectively. As users, you try to block one spambot, and its a losing battle because there’s 20,000 more accounts to take it’s place.
So is the real user count considerably less than the 350k+ we’re seeing now?
yeah likely 100k of those are bots
Based on…?
Based on the fact that 100k accounts all signed up within the space of like 2 days and there’s little to no bump in interaction on those instances.
Back of the envelope calculation using approx 10 instances that we know have known a surge of 10k new signups in less than one day, not meant to be exact but that’s an accurate order of magnitude.
Fair enough. I think I’m a couple days behind in the state-of-the-bots news. Since asking, I’ve seen a couple other posts with links to the instances with lots of sign ups and near zero posts. It’s not that I didn’t believe you (I swear!) I was just curious because I had heard some alternate explanations for previous jumps. Clearly I wasn’t paying close enough attention. Not the first time, almost certainly won’t be the last… ;-)
I own lemmyverse.net and I disagree. More users = more load. Users can pick an instance they are happy with.
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Actually your “smart sort” looks like it successfully ignores spammy looking instances, but a sort by # of users (which is a natural reflex since people coming from Reddits would feel comfortable with a large instance, we’re talking about people completely new to the Fediverse idea) gives this unknown “Coffee” instance as the 4th largest instance and its owner still hasn’t enabled captchas.
If someone wants an audience, I imagine spamming activity in your own communities would be more effective. If most people subscribe to the largest community in the topic they are interested in that could give you a lot of new eyes across all the instances.
