this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
626 points (98.2% liked)

Fediverse

27910 readers
1 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (5 children)

You gotta stop counting total users. Only active users should be counted. We know there's utterly massive numbers of bots being created. Plus people have multiple accounts from trying out different instances even if they'll only use one.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

True. I've created at least 4, myself.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

People love vanity metrics, though.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

But the bot + duplicate account numbers keep going up and I really like exponential growth

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Good to see, but as with all posts like this, it’s important to note that the really important number is “Active Users” That number has gone up significantly as well, just not as fast as number of accounts.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (12 children)

Yeah this is a good point.

It took me months to actually start using Lemmy and Mastodon. I would consider myself a tech savvy person and it still took a while getting used too. I think there need to be better tutorials linked on the sign-up pages that help people understand the basic concepts. That would help drive true user acquisition.

load more comments (12 replies)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What's considered an "Active User"?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

A person who posted/commented in the last 30 days

From the docs: "Lemmy also shows counts of active users for your site, and its communities. These are counted within the last day, week, month, and half year, and are cached on starting up lemmy, and every hour.

An active user is someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame. For site counts, only local users are counted. For community counts, federated users are included."

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html

load more comments (5 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

wow! look at those bots go! go speed racer!

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Just wait until Apollo/RIF/etc actually go dark!

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (9 children)
[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

My spez comic got over 1.5mil views advertising Lemmy yesterday and at least #12 on r/all so I'm hopeful they're not all bots too :P

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

i've only been on the platform for a few days but i've noticed a decent uptick in content and unique posts. probably still a lot of bots but with a decent surge of users and people getting a handle on the platform there's been a good bit of activity.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

More than 12

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

There was a pretty big jump in active instances, too!

Active daily user count is about 50k.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Daily active users is a much more reliable statistic due to bots


Source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Yup, came here to say that as well. it's al bots. The active users graph is much more realistic.

And I've been seeing some...odd looking.... comments recently from users at instances known for being mostly bots. Some of these comments really look AI generated, and have a suspicious number of upvotes.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

(Lemmy.world) server:

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Are these real people or bots? So far lemmy and the fediverse have been great experience I like it and won't go back to reddit. Hope it's real people and we can enjoy this new fresh start!

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm a new person that joined within the last few days, so they're not all bots, that's for sure.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

That’s what a bot would say!!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I am too a human who enjoys conversing with other humanoids. I am new but let me say to you I am very flesh blood fellow person.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

First post, post-Reddit 🥴

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Man, so much has changed. Glad I made the switch to Lemmy.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Are any of these accounts bots?

Or maybe how many of these accounts are bots?

Are they all bots?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

Around 95% accounts are bots. Around 90% if we are positive and assume that a lot of redditors joined since the bot farming started.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So what are the Bots doing? Who created them and why? I don't understand the purpose of bots.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Currently nothing but once activated they may start spamming stuff everywhere. Owners can decide what gets upvotes and what gets downvotes which gives you a lot of power on a platform where downvotes/upvotes mean everything.

load more comments (9 replies)
load more comments (10 replies)
load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Mom's forgetty

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

It shows 50,000 active users per day compared to 2,500,000 total users per day. Most of the difference, presumably, is dormant bot accounts. If they were all activated and started posting one day, they could probably bring the network down.

I'm confused though by the active comments per day being about 100 times the active users per day. Surely users are not commenting 100 times per day on average. Is there something wrong with how the comments are being counted?

The posts count also looks a bit odd, since it means active users are making more than 10 posts a day on average. That seems implausibly high.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

“average user posts 100 times per day" actualy just statistical error. average user posts 0 times per day. Feddi Georg, who lives in cave & posts over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That and some of the active users are also bots. Lemmit.online is a good example; that community is set up to harvest content from Reddit via RSS and then Bots post it into the community. Other users (including bots) can then cross post it to other parts of the Threadiverse. "Lemmit.Online Bot" has made 20.1k posts in 7 days.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are also hyperactive comment bots out there too.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Huzzah!

And now that I’m in the beta for Limbo / Liftoff, I’m loving it. The web experience was not great for me on mobile.

Servers still seem slow though. Posting a comment is slow. Loading images is slow. But I’m not going to complain about that when this kind of explosive growth is happening. Keeping things up at all is impressive.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

good to see but hope the bots can be purged at some point.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

+1, just joined the party.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Look at the graph and the uptick in activity. Note that on June 8, Reddit's u/iamthatis posted Apollo's intent to shut down.

https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits/

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I’m enjoying it so much more with the app development. Devs trying to accomplish the goal of instilling the feeling of Apollo for us refugees coming. I just needed useful communities, with posts that people reply to with more and more information. Reddit still defeats lemmy there but I’m hoping it changes a bit.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

alright, it's happening

load more comments
view more: next ›