Update: Pushing back against the wave of bot accounts on Lemmy - eviltoast

This is an update to my previous post about suspicious inactive accounts on a handful of instances: (https://sh.itjust.works/post/998307).

I ended up messaging the admins at the 16 instances show in the attached image. I pointed out their wild user numbers, and referenced the lemmy.ninja post detailing how that instance scrubbed suspicious accounts from their user database.

6 admins responded. They had all noticed the odd accounts and either thought the numbers were wrong, or weren’t sure how to purge the suspicious accounts without nuking their databases. In the end they managed to delete a combined total of about 338k dormant accounts from their instances. (One of the instances seems to have gone down since then.)

I never received a reply from the other 10 instance admins, though 8 of those 10 instances appear to be down (as of 27 July 2023). 2 instances are still up and unchanged.

Between the actively removed accounts and the downed instances, this represents a loss of 930,004 inactive Lemmy accounts!

You can see the drop in the graphs on The Federation. The total number of Lemmy accounts has been cut in half over the past 3 weeks, from a peak of 2.18M to today’s 1.09M. The change is mostly from these 16 instances.

I have to admit, I did not expect such a large change when I started this! Hopefully this bodes well for Lemmy’s future as a place where actual humans interact, rather than a cesspool of automated comments and upvote/downvote brigading.

That’s all I have for now. Keep your stick on the ice; we’re all in this together.

  • TheTaj@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Does this mean if I spend 6 months as a lemmy lurker you will nuke my account?

    • kersploosh@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      1 year ago

      If you created your account on these specific instances during a particular week in June 2023, and the instance admin decides your account looks suspicious, then you might get nuked. Otherwise, no worries. I’m not campaigning to remove all lurkers, or even trying to be thorough about removing possible bot accounts. I’m going after low-hanging fruit: a particular pool of suspicious-looking accounts on a handful of instances.