I think that someone setup a bot farm on lemmy platform
I think that someone setup a bot farm on lemmy platform
Here you can see 2 day old post warning about the danger of not using email/captcha verification: https://lemmy.ml/post/1345031
And here are stats of lemmy platform where it shows that we gained 200 000 lemmy users in 2 days: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
Another tracking site with the same explosion in users: https://the-federation.info/platform/73
What do you think? Is it some sort of a bug or do people run bot farms?
Edit: If you want to track if there's any sudden bump in amount of users on our instance you can do so here: https://the-federation.info/node/details/50294
Edit2: It's been now 3 days and we went from 150 000 user accounts 3 days ago to 700 000 user accounts today making it 550 000+ bot accounts and counting. Almost 80% accounts on lemmy are now bots and it may end up being an very serious issue for lemmy platform once they become active.
One of the admins announced in the comments that they will be defederating bot instances, you can track defederated by us instances here: https://fba.ryona.agency/?reverse=lemmy.fmhy.ml
Edit3: It's now 4th day of the attack and the amount of accounts on lemmy has almost reached 1 200 000. Almost 90% of total userbase are now bots and so far our instance didn't experience any sudden increase in the amount of created accounts.
Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
There's definitely bot farming. Someone i know on Mastodon posted this yesterdar: Post in spanish
this is a translations made by google and I changed some words: "I set up an instance of Lemmy, to test a few things. I passed it on WhatsApp to a group of people, so they could look at it. I always had the federation turned off because it's a test instance and I don't want to screw anyone in other instances. I had the configuration that it sends me an email if someone asks to register. Eventually trying configurations, I ended up leaving it with open registers. Last night I got about twenty new account registrations, with names that seem to want to imitate subreddits (ragequit, yolo, hype, things like that; I don't know subreddits like that but it sounds like they might exist). And various things:
- This instance doesn't connect to anything, nobody (apart from a group of people who reacted with total apathy to the issue) had that domain. It was not published, it was not federating. Registrations came just the same. It occurs to me that since it is lemmy.<domain> there is a bot testing that scheme with different domains.
- Lemmy sent me an email letting me know that these people applied for registration, but I can't see the registration application anywhere, because there was no application, there was registration. And that email is turned off by default. With a Lemmy instance configured "out of the box" you wouldn't know.
- Maybe it's me, but from the UI (at least on the phone) I can't find a way to see the list of users. I know the names from the email that came to me. The only thing I found is the search engine, and there I can search one by one.
All of this seems to me like a nightmare to moderate. And the truth is that I do not blame the instances of Lemmy at all that are blocking the instances that have open registration."
@[email protected] @[email protected] Do we have email verification on our instance?
Edit: sorry for ping but situation may be a bit urgent :x
Edit2: I'm not even sure if I pinged them xD
on lemmy.world they activated captchas which, apparently, is an option.
AFAIK no, it hasn't been setup yet
So we have captchas already enabed and had decided to enable email verification at the first sign of bot spam. So far I don't think any bot has targeted our instance, but if you find bot activity here in future message me or another admin and we'll turn on email verification.
Thanks for watching out on the situation.
Edit: https://fedidb.org/network/instance/lemmy.elest.io there are some very obvious bot instances setup now it seems.
Yesterday I saw the 100k bump of users but dismissed it assuming it was some bug or smth but today I saw that the trend continues and another tracking site also sees this bump. After checking the warning post I noticed that the flood aligns with when the post was posted.
The postcount also doubled...
Doesn't seem like good news