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?
Edit: If you want to track if there’s any sudden bump in amount of users on our instance you can do so here: https://the-federation.info/node/details/50294
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.
One of the admins announced in the comments that they will be defederating bot instances, you can track defederated by us instances here: https://fba.ryona.agency/?reverse=lemmy.fmhy.ml
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 and so far our instance didn’t experience any sudden increase in the amount of created accounts.
Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
We have them too but captchas only help so much, using both captchas and email verification makes it harder to do these things than when having only one of those security measurements.
and neither will prevent from spambots coming from other instances
Yes, but limiting the issue is a good practice. And if some instances become basically bot instances we can defederate from them when bots start being active.
Of course. All in all these are things that usually happen when a platform gets traction and publicity. Hopefully better tools to deal with this will come soon.
We already got lots of activity on github so we should have better tools in not far future. For example I saw few minutes ago a pull request on github with sorting options for 1 hour, 6 hours and 12 hours which already makes this platform better than reddit.
Wait that’s so cool now I’m hyped
I also made an issue on github asking for top 3 months, top 6 months, and top 9 months sorting options and someone started working on it within an hour. Now the code is waiting for the merge https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3226.