this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Sadly those are bots, real amount of users is around 150k. Source: https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/176547
I don't understand. Are you claiming that the first 150k users that signed up are all real and that since the rate of growth has increased exponentially that it couldn't possibly be real users signing up? I don't dispute that some of it is bots for sure. There are clearly places that have 20k users and 2 posts and stuff like that that are very suspicious. But I don't think it's at all reasonable to assert that all of the growth that has occurred are bots. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that. In fact, I would argue that the amount of activity (posts and comments) increasing alongside the user count is evidence to the contrary. I understand that bots can make posts too, but apart from the obviously labelled bots that are reposting content from reddit and stuff like that, I haven't seen any bot spam accounts posting links to suspicious sites or anything like that at all. Unless you're claiming that the bots are posting normal looking comments so that people think they are human? I don't understand.
Apparently a lot of those bots are just farming reddit and reposting here. Which I think in the short term is a good thing. People are more likely to join/stay if they see content. On the other I hope lemmy has the tools to prevent bot content from overwhelming user generated posts to the point that it loses the authenticity.
I would love to have a bot/a few scripts to migrate a lot of the useful posts that were on reddit over here for a few of my hobby communities instead of having to move them manually. I can definitely see a lot of use cases for those.
We know nothing. We say nothing.
I don't see the proof in that link, although maybe I'm missing something, it just seems to imply that is the case.
Agreed. It's literally just them saying "there are a lot of new users and theoretically they could all be bots, therefore they are all bots".
Captions and applications are not default enabled on an instance. There is no rate limit on the creation of accounts. Many new instances have 0 posts but 10,000 or 20,000+ user accounts. Startrek.website purged something like 20K fake accounts from their instance after enabling registration protections.
Active users will always be the better metric.