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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

  • zinklog@lemmy.fmhy.mlMEnglish
    13·
    2 years ago

    So we have captchas already enabed and had decided to enable email verification at the first sign of bot spam. So far I don’t think any bot has targeted our instance, but if you find bot activity here in future message me or another admin and we’ll turn on email verification.

    Thanks for watching out on the situation.

    Edit: https://fedidb.org/network/instance/lemmy.elest.io there are some very obvious bot instances setup now it seems.

      • zinklog@lemmy.fmhy.mlMEnglish
        8·
        2 years ago

        Yeah I don’t think there is anything useful in keeping federation with such instances, we’ll block the obvious ones and see how the situation develops.

        • Martineski@lemmy.fmhy.mlOPEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          80% of the accounts on lemmy are now bots, I think that it’s not worth risking getting our instance flooded and start doing email verification. So far we didn’t see any sudden inrease in user accounts on our instance though.