@atomicpoet It's looking like some of these numbers are spam bot accounts.
Looks like a number of instances have been started by well-meaning admins (?) that have left signups open to help with load and then inundated with spam accounts, possibly because they left signups completely open (ie no email verification etc?).
Look through the list of servers, there are quite a few that have thousands of users but 1 or 2 MAUs.
So far, some have looked into their databases and confirmed that basically no users from these instances are doing anything.
So right now the growth and current number has to be taken with a grain of salt. Ideally, we could probably extrapolate from the MAU number if we could pinpoint what the MAU/User ratio was before the spam bot inundation. Fedidb doesn't quite allows us to easily do that I don't think.
Still, spam is a sign of success and real growth, right?
Probably makes sense to stop trumpeting the growth, it's probably fairly bloated with spam bots right now and substantially lower than these numbers. And, somewhat embarrassingly, it's caused by a bunch of people starting instances with completely open signups (ironic, in a way, given lemmy.ml's policy).
@maegul@atomicpoet Yep. We doubled in size from 2000 to 4000 yesterday because of spam bots. None of them got through because we require email verification, and they're now all banned, but still, they appear in our user numbers
I've poked around the lemmy-verse a little and it seems people are aware of the problem and are starting to address it. Adding requirements to sign-ups and captcha and talking about solutions. It will be interesting to see if the problem subsides or if enough instances will stay open or get created for the spam bots to find.
The influx into the lemmyverse has been impressive.
A caveat is that if you look at the sidebar on fedidb.org and click through on some of the instances that are reporting the biggest gains in the past few days some of them are clearly one person instances misreporting that they have thousands of users.
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