Some suspicious activity these last 2 days...
Some suspicious activity these last 2 days...
There has been a big spike in growth over the last 2 days, and some rather suspicious new instances appeared out of nowhere with thousands of new users, even though there is close to no activity in any of them.
Could all those be bots? Would it be smart to block those instances preemptively?
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As for us, i am having a close eye on incoming names – so far pretty much all look authentic (speaking from mastodon experience) .. i hope thats the case, it doesn't scale well to manually approve so many people...
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I hope so too. Thanks for looking out.
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I fit this cohort but I'm here legitimately. I feel like there was a "breaking point" that we are overtly past the point of no return that was solidified with the chaos over the weekend. I have been putting a Lemmy account off because "I'll do it when the Apps are done" but it's just so bad to force it preemptively.
I think this is a fitting first post to break away from lurker-ship.
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I'm interested to see how instances will deal with spam accounts. Blocking the obvious ones seems like a good idea. What about the bigger instances with both legit users and spam accounts? How would you go about weeding out the spam?
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I think at least some of us are reddit refugees. I found this place by following one of the mods from r/skookum here.
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Same for me (from a different sub). Lots of ex Reddit users seem to look for a new home.
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This seems to roughly correlate with sub.rehab topping InternetIsBeautiful. The distribution of subreddits with new lemmy instances is what convinced me to switch, that spike might be my fellow migrants.
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I saw a Heise article with a mention (and link) to the tchncs lemmy instance few days ago.
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While that's obviously a considerably more tech savvy crowd than average, I highly doubt people would just spin up private instances with large number of users, that part still seems suspicious.
But yes, heise had repeatedly mentioned tchncs instance in it's Reddit-related articles as one of if the alternatives. So increases in signups are expected from that I think.
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Very likely the case indeed
Captcha needs to be enabled to battle this or signups per x seconds lowered
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It does look strange, but they could be refugees from the collapse of Reddit.
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I don't think it's weird or necessarily a problem that instances like lemmy.ml or lemmy.world would be rapidly gaining users recently. cubing.social is pretty weird though. There's nothing wrong with wanting an account there, but what would motivate 24.4k users to sign up in 12 days with hardly any content being posted locally? Are there private communities or something?
I'm worried about the panic though. If everybody starts defederating because they don't like the metrics of other instances then either federation will fail overall or it will become like e-mail where you can't really run your own e-mail server anymore because major mail providers basically federate on an allow list instead of a block list.
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Sure, but why on these days specifically? I don't think anything happened that could've triggered such a sudden spike of users...
I also ran into this post, talking about it.
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