I don't doubt there's a great amount of user growth, but it appears that many of those are account creation spam on instances with 1 active monthly user though.
Yeah, no idea whether this is spammers trying to stake turf or someone trying to inflate the user count to stick it to reddit (or something) but the numbers from the 18th on are clearly inauthentic.
Conspiracy theory: what if Reddit is using it’s not army to make a bunch of dead/spam accounts to try to make Lemmy instances more expensive solely to try to price them out of their space so they can then turn and point to how “Reddit alternatives aren’t viable/stable.”
On one hand, that’s obviously stupid and not true. On the other hand, I can see Huffman being petty and malicious enough to do something like that.
Inactive accounts don't really add any expense. Creating a bot farm to create large amounts of artificial traffic to crush competitors would risk antitrust lawsuits that would actually cripple the company.
Hell, fake it till you make it isn't that bad a strategy to attract new users.
Of course, you also need content. I hope people start making bots which steal content from reddit, which bots on reddit steal from twitter/insta/tiktok/snapchat. That way we can all cut out the middle-man.
On a side note, I think it's really cool that I'm on kbin and commenting on something on lemmy.
First comment on lemmy. It's exciting, but like, difficult. I can't be the only one who thinks it's too complicated. Reddit had one subreddit per thing. Here, there's infinite instances with so many of the same subreddit.
If you want to see stats of real instances, the "All lemmy nodes" table on this page actually lists the real non-bot instances at the top: https://the-federation.info/platform/73
I joined in the last few days. Seems like this site has much better content. Less bots and reposts. Plus, the user base seems a lot more intelligent in general at this point.
Click on your profile, and go to settings. Then change interface language to English. But this seems like the wrong kind of thread for posting support questions.
Just heard the news about Sync and instantly registered here. I'll still be hoping for Boost to cross over, but Sync is infinitely better than Reddit's app. A decent client was all that was missing for me to make the plunge, let's hope that's the case for more people.
before lemmy blew up the count was 150k but many joined in the last few days. sure many are boys but until an effective way to filter them out is there we can't know the precise numbers.
Captions and applications are not default enabled on an instance. There is no rate limit on the creation of accounts. Many new instances have 0 posts but 10,000 or 20,000+ user accounts. Startrek.website purged something like 20K fake accounts from their instance after enabling registration protections.
I don't understand. Are you claiming that the first 150k users that signed up are all real and that since the rate of growth has increased exponentially that it couldn't possibly be real users signing up? I don't dispute that some of it is bots for sure. There are clearly places that have 20k users and 2 posts and stuff like that that are very suspicious. But I don't think it's at all reasonable to assert that all of the growth that has occurred are bots. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that. In fact, I would argue that the amount of activity (posts and comments) increasing alongside the user count is evidence to the contrary. I understand that bots can make posts too, but apart from the obviously labelled bots that are reposting content from reddit and stuff like that, I haven't seen any bot spam accounts posting links to suspicious sites or anything like that at all. Unless you're claiming that the bots are posting normal looking comments so that people think they are human? I don't understand.
Apparently a lot of those bots are just farming reddit and reposting here. Which I think in the short term is a good thing. People are more likely to join/stay if they see content. On the other I hope lemmy has the tools to prevent bot content from overwhelming user generated posts to the point that it loses the authenticity.
That's an interesting take, but I could definitely see it working out. As long as the reposted content isn't ads or spam, it could help the fediverse have content while it grows.
I would love to have a bot/a few scripts to migrate a lot of the useful posts that were on reddit over here for a few of my hobby communities instead of having to move them manually. I can definitely see a lot of use cases for those.
Oh man, I hope this server can maintain. Support if you can. There is no CEO but there is a server admin who has to pay for us to be on it. No centralization means its up to us to keep it going. I don't know the history of lemmy world and I'd hate to see it go because it was too expensive for it's popularity. Something to think about.
It's run by the same guy who runs mastodon.world (Ruud) so he has experience with huge servers. Apparently this server is currently set up to handle a million users. Here's the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mastodonworld
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