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.

    • kionay@lemmy.worldEnglish
      18·
      2 years ago

      The transparency may be my very favorite part of Lemmy. It’s almost feels like these people are invested in it’s success instead of it’s profit.

  • Moracrema@lemmy.worldEnglish
    321·
    2 years ago

    Those are crazy numbers… WTF?

    If that’s is the reality for Lemmy, I can’t imagine the number of bots giant social networks have. Crazy.

    Thank you for your work.

    • U de Recife@lemmy.sdfeu.orgEnglish
      19·
      2 years ago

      That’s the thing, right? Those giant networks’ admins surely know how inflated their userbase is. They surely know that a lot of the activity is bot faked/manipulated.

      But since the end goal of those networks is generate traffic to sell something (ads, user data), they never purge the bots. They need fake engagement. They might even promote it. The human user is just being used (Cf. Stallman’s use of this term).

  • U de Recife@lemmy.sdfeu.orgEnglish
    20·
    2 years ago

    I want to celebrate two things. 1. Your awareness of the potential dangers looming over the fediverse. 2. Your proactive attitude curtailing the problem at its root. From one human to another, thank you!

  • hmancuso@lemmy.worldEnglish
    18·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • z00s@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    2 years ago

    actual humans interact, rather than a cesspool of automated comments and upvote/downvote brigading.

    Thank you! That’s why I left the other place. You’re doing God’s work, anon.

  • WarmSoda@lemm.eeEnglish
    91·
    2 years ago

    What are qualifications for being an active account? I didn’t see any details in the other thread about it either, just the graphs. Is it just post/comment creation? Is it page views? Log ins? Does voting up or down register an account as Active?

    If it’s only post/comments then you’re possibly deleting a bunch of lurkers too.

    • thessnake03@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 years ago

      Probably happening to some degree already, unless no robots is checked. No way lemmy jumps as high as reddit in seo for random things for a long while

      • YⓄ乙 @aussie.zoneEnglish
        5·
        2 years ago

        Naa…I think instance admins have to let the crawlers index the content. Not sure if Admins have enabled it

        • Historical_General@lemmy.worldEnglish
          27·
          2 years ago

          A major advantage of the old place was that you could search up keywords and find a discussion on it. When I wasn’t browsing, the other times that I’d end up using it was for when I needed to look stuff up.

          I’m not sure what the pros cons ratio is though.

  • dreikelvin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    2 years ago

    Suggestion: what if there was a lemmy instance solely for reporting malicious lemmy/fediverse servers? I’ve read some stuff about FBI crackdown and mastodon instances containing questionable material. Wouldn’t it be gret to have some kind of federated “registry” of all the bad actors out there? I am pretty clueless, but would that help?

    • gabe [he/him]@literature.cafeEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      Might work. Like a lemmy admin coordination hub instance? On mastodon there is “fediblock,” which is what you’re describing.

      I do know that there is lemmyadmin.site currently, but it’s not extremely active as far as I can tell.