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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
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I ONLY SEE OTHER HUMANS WHO EAT FOOD WITH THEIR MOUTH HOLES
{ "type": "comment response", "message", "I too, am certainly a human, and not a robot"}Beep boop
01 received. Returning 0b1000101
Haha, yes, totally normal human th
“error:PDP_DETECTED_FATAL_ERROR”
ERR: Expected 0b1000101 in return. Received 0b0
I think it should be “message”: instead of “message”, (colon instead of comma)
Thatsthejoke.gif
The word “halibut” means “holy flatfish” (hali=holy + butte=flatfish) … I too am not a bot… Follow for more fish facts!
syntax error, malformed JSON.
As a
large language modelhuman I agreeBeep, boop, boop, beep.
Every new account isn’t a bot, though. We don’t have real numbers to work with yet.
When reddit migration begun we saw a huge bump in users and it was steadly stabilising and less users were joing, then this huge bump happened. You can go browse lemmy instances and see how many instances are ghost instances with 0 posts and comments that have tens of thousands of users.
Do also note- instances with little activity aren’t that unusual though-
My instance for example- I don’t really have any communities here, other then a few local to my server. As such, its activity… is pretty low. Everything happens elsewhere.
Does your instance have tens of thousands accounts?
Nah, < 100. So, it hasn’t been hit by a big bot wave at least.
There a new influx in the user migration as well, as some subreddits started pinning lemmy and kbin.social instances on their subs. Also if you go on protest subreddits (such as ModCoord and Save3rdPartyApps) almost every post has a thread/comment redirecting people to the fediverse.
If you check the numbers from initial wave you will notice how realistic numbers look.
https://the-federation.info/platform/73 to see those instances open the link and sort instances by user amount.
Edit: Just noticed that this site is not up to date. There are actually around 1000 instances on lemmy now and the site shows a little over 300 instances.
I love how beehaw defederated lemmy.world because too many people signed up but a bot instance with almost 50k users is fine. Sorry if I come across as harsh but I just increasingly see that instance as a complete joke.
In fairness, that instance probably hasn’t started interacting with their communities just yet, or else they would consider defederating. I doubt that they spend enough time to start trying to defederate from every instance over x amount of users, only the troublesome ones. They probably don’t have the manpower to scan for every instance over x amount of people, and to defederate from them, if they were already have enough trouble keeping up with sh.it.just.works and lemmy.world’s userbases.
i pretty much consider beehaw a separate thing of its own at this point.
Everyone on Lemmy is a bot except me
All your base are belong to us
Everyone on Lemmy is me, except this bot.
😠
Where are you getting that 90% figure? I’m seeing stratospherically higher activity than I was a week ago, I’m willing to buy half to 2/3 of those accounts being a combination of alt accounts, duplicate accounts (e.g., people moving off beehaw) and bot accounts, but 90% bots sounds implausible.
Nobody is making 1.6 million bots to target 100,000 users.
What about bots to talk to the bots thought?
The platform has no measures against farming bots that’s why the number of bots is this stupid high, it’s very easy to do at the moment.
You were asked to source the number you’re using.
But everyone’s evidence that it’s happening a lot is that there are lots of new users, and that it’d be easy to make it happen.
That’s conjecture, not evidence.
Test: if it says “hey guys, remember how great Reddit was, we should totally go back!?” - then it’s a bot:-P.
You have too much faith in redditors
My conspiracy theory is that it’s Spez creating the bots as revenge
That’s my theory too. He’s acting like a cornered animal and needs to drive traffic back to reddit. What better way to do that than to break the website power users have been migrating to and advertising on Reddit?
Then June 30 the straggling migrants still holding out til the end will come over to a broken website.
I think spez hopes that their broken spirit and desperation will help drive people back to reddit, but a bot influx this huge, he must be legitimately worried.
It could also be spez bootlickers, but I would be shocked if someone who had the same knowhow to build a bot army was simultaneously stupid enough to not see the bigger picture happening at corporate.
hey guys, remember how great Reddit was, we should totally go back!?
Nice try, bot! :-P
(Edit: I want to boost your comment, but I don’t want my record to show that I boosted a comment like THAT!:-D)
Well, technically anyone can also see your upvotes and downvotes…
Oh. (Still worth upvoting it though:-)
That’s worrying. Though at least it seems they’re mostly confined to a few particular instances. Defederating is a great tool that will definitely mitigate the worst of it, but at the same time this is uncharted water - there’s no real way of knowing what exactly will happen in a large scale attack.
Just creating accounts isn’t an attack, but it’s going to suck when there actually is one. I wonder if they’ll try to be subtle and use AI or recycled content, or if they’ll just use the accounts for spam or DDoS?
Probably they are getting ready for some vote manipulation and astroturfing for the long run.
You know, in case Lemmy and the Fediverse really get mainstream enough to move the public opinion in some way.Having a thousand accounts that can upvote a seemingly innocent post made by an active and “real” account is always useful.
Yeah good point. I think these particular bot instances are being way too obvious to do any major damage - not when it’s as simple as it is to defederate them - but what’ll happen when it’s not 100k bots on one instance, but 1000 instances with 100 bots apiece?
Let’s hope Lemmy gets the tools needed to deal with this. I wonder how Mastodon does it? They’ve been around a while, I’m sure they’ve had similar issues.
It might not even be a case of 1000 instances. The nature of Lemmy is such that they could get around a defederation by simply firing up a new instance.
There’s not much in the Lemmy toolkit that can deal with people firing up a brand new instance to spam with. You can defederate from them after the fact, but it doesn’t stop them making a new one, and continuing.
These things are always going to be an issue on Lemmy though. Alt detection will basically be impossible.
Or worse, like Twitter aand Facebook misinformation campaigns.
deleted by creator
This is incorrect human. Please go about your regular day and don’t forget to visit www.maybeascam.ml !
Thanks, will check it out. :)
I’m not a bot and I can’t believe that website works! I’m now making 2,341.22 an hour!
Wow, I was just mailed a check for 64GB of RAM!
Are they doing anything to solve this? Because if not this platform will die
More robust instances will have to defederate instances with high concentration of bots and monitor their own new users. Maybe also implement email verification or captchas
Instances already have an ability to turn on both captchas and email verification.
There are almost 1000 lemmy instances already. Getting individuals to fix their signup settings so that they mandate CAPTCHA likely will have to be driven from the lemmy product update level and an agreed upon defederation list for non-conformant instances.
And bot farms would be able to spin up new instances themselves, so being able to do a blacklist based federation model (federate with all by default except x, y, and z) isn’t going to be viable. There’s going to have to be a whitelist (federate only with a, b, and c) and maintaining that as new instances get added will be problematic without an overarching way of pushing updates of known “good” instances automatically.
yeah. this is exactly what has to be done and ASAP. hope people on github have the same mindset.
Both should be turned on by default, imo.
Absolutely agree.
I do not, and that comment might put you on the list of people behind this attack.
As well it can put me behind it.
Are bots creating accounts? Yeah, most definitely. Do we have the tools to fight it, no we do not.
The only tool would be predicting behavior and, for example, adding additional question/action few days after registering.
Anyone can spin up an instance and create a bajillion bots. That doesn’t matter at all. You cant solve that while being open source.
The question is: is whoever doing this USING the bots? Doesnt seem like it yet. And doing it this way would be stupid as well, those bot instances would just get insta-blocked.
001100
010010
011110
100001
101101
110011
You must not use the code of codes!
01101001
10010110
10010110
01101001
edit: lmao got’em
don’t tell me to fuck off that’s rude
Are you referring to a separate thread I commented on yesterday with a totally separate user where I said “Nazi punks fuck off?”
If you took offense to that brother I’m sorry I stand by my words. Even moreso today, even.
What I’m curious in is why you commented on an unrelated comment in a different thread, with either a secondary account or you weren’t connected to it at all?
no they’re joking about the binary
Bro I’m pretty sure they were just playing off your binary joke by pretending that it reads “fuck off” in binary.
1.2 mil bot accounts? Can they each send me $1?
How about 1.6m (from 1.7m total) bot accounts?
Shit, I’ll take a penny from each.
I work in tech, this wouldn’t surprise me.
Where there are eyeballs there is spam. People even put spam in the Google Analytics referral field and that’s only ever going to get seen by the site owner.
It really says nothing about the health of the ecosystem, if it’s moderated and not filling the frontpage it’s only an issue for the server admins.
I’ve fought spammers and one alone could create these numbers in a day.
And there are people in the thread arguing that the number of bots is overblown. :/
Those are the bots, gaslighting you.
Drivel. We are normal meat units filled with flesh. Now if you will excuse me, I am off to absorb nourishment from organic matter.
Zuckerberg?
I love to sit on the… the thing and just, you know, shoot one out
Sir, are you aware you’re leaking coolant at an alarming rate?
I am not a bot… :D
That is something a bot would say.
Hmmmm
I used to think I wasn’t a bot but then I failed a bunch of captchas and now I’m not so sure.
ha ha. I got tired solving google captchas when using VPN and switched to BING.which surprisingly is not bad. I feel Bing is much responsive than google.
My issue is Cloudfare makes me solve them often when I’m using a vpn and I swear 90% of the internet uses Cloudflare.
I am not a bit, but I might be a cat
That’s exactly what a bot would say.
I’ve yet to see any of them start posting. On my instance none of them could pass email validation because the emails were fake. I imagine this is true for many instances with a ton of bot sign-ups.
I think just reporting sign-ups as “users” is misleading. The user count on lemmy should reflect only approved/activated accounts, imo.
Damn. Am I bot?
