this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/1823812

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.

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[–] hmancuso@lemmy.world 35 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you for your efforts to keep this place clean and civil, and especially for the transparency in describing how you've dealt with such annoyances. You have my respect.

[–] elbarto777@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] thorbot@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] elbarto777@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] thorbot@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

No that’s been my nickname for 15 years

[–] magnor@lemmy.magnor.ovh 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sounds like something a bot would say.

[–] thorbot@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I’m sure a bot would use it’s critical thinking skills and out itself as such.