This list looks disgusting af, most instances are less than 1 day old and have no subscribers. Trackers like Fediverse Observer and Lemmyverse should consider flagging them as spam otherwise these "leaderboards" are just going to encourage instance owners to inflate subscriber #s using bots.
It's the new form of marketing really. Ads aren't super effective anymore as they've reached saturation and are showing severely diminished returns, so the next thing you can do is to create bot posts in the form of 'product testimonials' similar to what a person would see on amazon reviews, but from a source they're more likely to trust such as a subreddit comment chain.
Ie. Initial: I use [product], going on 15 years etc.
Reponse: I use it too works great.
Alt response: I use [diff. product], its cheaper but works the same.
The "buy it for life" subreddit was full of them.
Of course it gets a little more inisidious when it's not just used for pushing products, but instead pushing ideas or propaganda. It's commonly referred to as psyops, and they try to maintain a steady presence on any popular online forum. It was a big problem on Tumblr for a long time before Reddit.
Also news post bots are super common, they want to generate traffic to their news sites, as that is their source of ad revenue. Lots of ad revenue related bots making posts to generate site traffic. Some of it's not the worst thing to have, creates something of a newsfeed and a lot of it is already present here or on Mastodon.
It becomes problematic when you have very biased news organizations and they're allowed to use bots to upvote their news articles with impunity so all you see is biased news, it circles right back around to psyops.
Also ad revenue fraud is something that happens a lot. Ad engagement with a bot that is meant to simulate a user browsing the site and clicking on an ad so that the person hosting the ads gets paid by the person who put the ad up. Sometimes it happens on entirely fake websites with entirely fake traffic, its much easier when you dont have to fake all the traffic and just the ad engaging traffic, as it adds legitimacy to the website. I wouldnt be surprised if a good portion of Reddits revenue is from ad fraud. It would go a long way to explaining why traffic was down only 6% during blackouts, if a large portion of the 94% remaining traffic was ad engagement bots.
Well, since we own the instances and every user, even if a remote user, is also user of every instance they interact with, we should be able to run some analysis tools and weed out the bots and astroturfers.
It depends on how federated platforms react, it’s necessary to control who signs up in some way, if that’s “globally” accepted trust can hold well long term.
Right now the instances are working to stifle this by restricting account creation, but we're just a step away from spammers creating instances on demand, flooding networks with stuff like the crypto spam on Reddit. I'm thinking major instances are going to have to go whitelist federation as a result.
We did notice a large amount of bot sign-ups early on. We already ha email verification on and they never made it past that stage.
We have since turned on CAPTCHA and now they aren't signing up any longer.
We've purged the bot accounts from our database.
We are working on generating organic content but we've only been open for a couple weeks so I just ask that other instances bear with us. We've a very niche community of sci-fi and fantasy geeks. We'd love to be federated again.
Not my spreadsheet, this is a crosspost. Also it looks like the content is being auto-generated and the sheet is read-only. There's nothing they could really do by having this information.