Pushing back against the wave of bot accounts on Lemmy
Pushing back against the wave of bot accounts on Lemmy
Hi everyone. I wanted to share some Lemmy-related activism I’ve been up to. I got really interested in the apparent surge of bot accounts that happened in June. Recently, I was able to play a small part in removing some of them. Hopefully by getting the word out we can ensure Lemmy is a place for actual human users and not legions of spam bots.
First some background. This won't be new to many of you, but I'll include it anyway. During the week of June 18 to June 25, as the Reddit migration to Lemmy was in full swing, there was a surge of suspicious account creation on Lemmy instances that had open registration and no captcha or email verification. Hundreds of thousands of accounts appeared and then sat inactive. We can only guess what they’re for, but I assume they are being planted for future malicious use (spamming ads, subversive electioneering, influencing upvotes to drive content to our front pages, etc.)
If you look at the stats on The Federation you might notice that even the shape of the Total Users graphs are the same across many instances. User numbers ramped up on June 18, grew almost linearly throughout the week, and peaked on June 24. (I’m puzzled by the slight drop at the end. I assume it's due to some smoothing or rate-sensitive averaging that The Federation uses for the graphs?)
Here are total user graphs for a few representative instances showing the typical shape:
Clearly this is suspicious, and I wasn’t the only one to notice. Lemmy.ninja documented how they discovered and removed suspicious accounts from this time period: (https://lemmy.ninja/post/30492). Several other posts detailed how admins were trying to purge suspicious accounts. From June 24 to June 30 The Federation showed a drop in the total number of Lemmy users from 1,822,313 to 1,589,412. That’s 232,901 suspicious accounts removed! Great success! Right?
Well, no, not yet. There are still dozens of instances with wildly suspicious user numbers. I took data from The Federation and compared total users to active users on all listed instances. The instances in the screenshot below collectively have 1.22 million accounts but only 46 active users. These look like small self-hosted instances that have been infected by swarms of bot accounts.
As of this writing The Federation shows approximately 1.9 million total Lemmy accounts. That means the majority of all Lemmy accounts are sitting dormant on these instances, potentially to be used for future abuse.
This bothers me. I want Lemmy to be a place where actual humans interact. I don’t want it to become another cesspool of spam bots and manipulative shenanigans. The internet has enough places like that already.
So, after stewing on it for a few days, I decided to do something. I started messaging admins at some of these instances, pointing out their odd account numbers and referencing the lemmy.ninja post above. I suggested they consider removing the suspicious accounts. Then I waited.
And they responded! Some admins were simply unaware of their inflated user counts. Some had noticed but assumed it was a bug causing Lemmy to report an incorrect number. Others weren’t sure how to purge the suspicious accounts without nuking their instances and starting over. In any case, several instance admins checked their databases, agreed the accounts were suspicious, and managed to delete them. I’m told that the lemmy.ninja post was very helpful.
Check out these early results!
Awesome! Another 144k suspicious accounts are gone. A few other admins have said they are working on doing the same on their instances. I plan to message the admins at all the instances where the total accounts to active users ratio is above 10,000. Maybe, just maybe, scrubbing these suspected bot accounts will reduce future abuse and prevent this place from becoming the next internet cesspool.
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading! Also, special thanks to the following people:
@[email protected] for your helpful post!
@[email protected], @[email protected], and @[email protected] for being so quick to take action on your instances!
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This is brilliant, but I think you might be over looking something here. I’m part of the reddit migration and a like a lot of new users I didn’t know what I was doing or really understand instances when I joined. So I ended up signing up on a few different instances before I understood. 3 of my accounts are inactive, but I don’t want to delete them necessarily - having alt accounts makes sense.
Lemmy.world is my main account, but it was completely overwhelmed for a couple a days at the start of the migration and was pretty much unusable. Some instances have already defederated from other instances, or are debating doing so in future. And then there was the hack that rendered a bunch of instances unusable. Not to mention I might want a separate porn account, professional account etc… I wouldn’t be surprised if there were double the number of genuine (but inactive) accounts created 3 weeks ago as there were new sign ups.
From your numbers the bot accounts still far outnumber the genuine accounts, even if every new user made 4 like me. But I’d be concerned about genuine inactive accounts being chucked out with the bots. Although maybe that’s better than the alternative?
The way I did it was just deleting any account that signed up, but didn't complete email verification within one hour.
The bots weren't completing email verification.
Though that's only during 0.18 when captcha didn't work, I don't have email verification on now and didn't before 0.18 so I don't know how they identify them now
There's a bug currently going around that allows people to gain your account info, there is no way I'm giving lemmy my email address.
Well with bots running rampant and captchas gone, I didn't have much other choice.
I told people feel free to use a burner/temp email
Doesn't matter anyway captchas are back and email verification isn't required
Oh yeah, I wasn't dissing the method. Just explaining to people that it's currently not a great idea to link your email.
That sounds like a good compromise. Is there a way to message all inactive accounts and asking them to complete a captcha before a certain date, or the accounts will be deleted?
That's me. I've been creating multiple accounts and hopping around. It's only been a week so nothing permanently planted quite yet.
I’d like to wait a month or so and let everything settle before I decide which instance I make my main account. There’s so much going on at the moment the admins, hosts, mods and developers/programmers deservedly need a minute to get on top of everything. I’d like to retain my inactive accounts until then, especially as we’re talking about what these inactive accounts might do in the future, not an army of malicious bots attacking now.
Exactly. I know in "internet time" it's been forever. Reddit kicked me out. Lemmy (and similar sites) exploded with users. Twitter closed out strangers. Threads launched. Twitter opened the door a little. Lemmy instances experienced an XSS and were vandalized. Some are still down or in various states.
It's been a crazy week. One fucking week, and it was a vacation week (for many).
And I know this entire investigation is into accounts before all that. I just hope the folks (admins) take a minute to really let this all play out a little bit and sink in.
I did this too. I initially signed up at beehaw but they then defederated from many of the larger instances. So it's already become a very specific vibe and focus when I log in there. I have a local instance I joined that I use to keep up with sports and local news. And another for general scrolling and discovering new communities. I tried to create a specific use for each one rather than having several abandoned accounts I made before I understood how it worked.
Same here. I signed up with the same username on 9 different instances. Had no idea how it all worked. 8 of the 9 accounts are mostly inactive now as I stick to just this one