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?
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.
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.
Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
Owners can use those bots to boost choosen posts/comments with a lot of upvotes or downvote something into oblivion if they don’t like something. Bots can be also used for spam and advertising stuff. Overall, if the bots become active the platform will be fucked as the quality of everything will go down. One problem that affects us now is that we lost a reliable way of telling how much factual users are on the platform.
I don’t need bots to do that.
there’s no karma points on the fedi.
Karma doesn’t matter, it’s the power to make whatever you want visible by upvoting it hower many times you want or to make something invisible by downvoting it if you don’t like it. As long the amount of downvotes/upvotes is realistic then it will be impossible to know when bots touch something.