Unfortunately, we need to hold our horses. You might notice the mysterius doubling in postcount within a single day, and the fact that the "fastest growing" instances are obscure ones empty of content, and ones that don't require email/captcha for an account. Lastly, only lemmy spiking while kbin continued on basically same.
I don't think it is bots. I think lemmy instances are counting any user they are aware of as a local user, and instead of the stats people are quoting being accurate, they are simply adding the number of users advertised on each instance. take my instance for example. It has over 10k users in the database for local users. there has been nowhere near that amount of email sent by my server, nor has there been that much traffic. I have not dug any deeper as of yet, but I suspect a flaw in the way users are tracked and not a flood of bots or new users.
Is it possible to plot lemmy+kbin user registration along with reddit active users on the same plot? Not sure if that data is actually available or not...
This is nothing to celebrate, it's an invasion of spambots on under-admin'ed instances: https://lemm.ee/post/177673
If you had screenshotted the active user counts, you'd see they increased 10% rather than the quadrupling of the registered user count. 10% growth per day is still monstrous, but celebrating the 4x registered user count over the last few days is celebrating a bot attack.
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