Lemmy has multiplied it's number of users (maybe more accurately accounts) in just few days. How much do you think is the percentage of bot accounts? Is Lemmy having problem with bot farming?
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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I saw some very big instances on fedidb yesterday. I looked at a few.... Completely empty instances, no communities, no posts, but 24k users.
I'm pretty sure those are all bot/spam accounts. So the numbers right now are very inflated imho.
It certainly didn't take long to spot servers like that on fedidb! I wonder what is causing people to make those? Load testing? Spam farm? Social experiment to see if people will sign up to an empty instance? Trying to setup an automated simulated social network like people joked reddit was where everyone is a bot except for you?
I think the most realistic answer is that they're test instances either by a tech company that believes they have a path to monetize a fediverse project or by some kind of spam farm, but the lack of any posts is still positively weird
Hah! The idea of an simulated social network sounds weirdly interesting. An idea that just pops into my head would be a (mystery) game based on a lemmy instance, where bots progress the story line and people can participate by finding clues in communities of the instance and triggering the next phase of the story by commenting in the right spots. 🤔