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Is parapheum.com an example of botted user lemmy instance?

So on https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list you can see parapheum.com has currently 6112 users if you go to parapheum.com it has only 1 community, is this an example of botting? Or am I missing something since I am a one day old lemmy user.

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  • It's also possible, being that it's a new instance, it's just being used to subscribe to communities outside of that instance.

    • That wouldn't explain where the 6112 users suddenly came from.

      I noticed this as well. Within just a few hours a whole bunch of newer instances have suddenly shot up by several thousand users each. My guess is that people are using bots to take advantage of the sign-up bugs and are creating thousands of bot account to use in various annoying and nefarious ways in the near future.

      • I didn't have a good frame of reference. I see now that 6000+ users is abnormal.

    • Maybe. Instances full of lurkers ... it makes sense.

      You can see the communities that users of that instance have subscribed to from the instance's main page: communities -> All.

      In the case of parapheum, there's a few but not that many ... I'd expect more given a user base of ~7k.

      If you go to fedidb (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy ) they list the MAU (monthly active users) for each instance. Instances like parapheum only have like 1 or a few MAU. As I understand, to be an "active" user, one must post at least once. I presume this includes comments as well as full posts. If so, there should really be more than 1 MAU for ~7k users. So it's hard to tell.

      I've checked the admins of a couple of these instances, and they seem to be real and have had interactions ... so maybe we should ask some of them what's up.

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