You gotta stop counting total users. Only active users should be counted. We know there's utterly massive numbers of bots being created. Plus people have multiple accounts from trying out different instances even if they'll only use one.
Active users isn't perfect either, for two reasons:
Bot accounts can be actively doing things -- in fact, it's likely that they will do so at some point to build legitimacy. We had someone farming regularly-created bot accounts back on /r/europe around the time I left, reposting slightly-mangled old comments and slightly cropped and rotated old highly-upvoted old images. Dozens of accounts a day.
Some (human) users are just going to lurk, and won't become active users.
It may be an input into a better estimate, and may be better than total users at this point, but it isn't the "right" number either, and I would wager that it will start to increasingly deviate from the legitimate number if people start activating bots.
Speak for yourself. I enjoy analyzing the posts and discussing the growth. It brings up discussions of what stats are better to look at to analyze user growth, how to handle the growth, and what if any moderation/sign up workflows should be implemented. Go be a hater somewhere else.
[A line graph is shown depicting the number of users on Lemmy over one month's time. The horizontal axis lists the date of each reading, with an interval shown for every day. The earliest date begins at '2023-05-27' and the most recent date is given as '2023-06-25'. The vertical axis measures the number of users, with intervals marked at every 500,000 users, with an upper limit of 2,500,000 users. A blue line labelled 'users' shows the increase over time. The line remains flat at approximately 50,000 users from the '05-27' date mark to the '06-06' mark, then begins to gradually increase to approximately 125,000 users. At the '06-18' date mark, the line begins increasing exponentially, with the last marked date coming just shy of 2.5 million users.]
^I'm a human volunteer transcribing posts in a format compatible with screen readers, for blind and visually impaired users!^
Yeah I just found out about this project/the fediverse, been looking for several weeks for the best replacement to Reddit and this is by far the most promising. Also, as a self-hosting enthusiast, I'm liking this place more and more by the minute. With any luck increased visibility will continue to push activity & content. Power to the people.
It'll take a while for the volume to trickle down to the smaller more niche communities, but I have already seen the volume increase tremendously in the large ones. Let's enjoy the ride.
Quick math: With 2.5 million users and 50k daily active users, let's assume that there are around 100k maximum real users. This means that approximately 2.4 million accounts are bots, duplicated accounts, or inactive.
To address this issue, we need to find a solution sooner rather than later. One possible solution is to implement measures to prevent bots and remove inactive accounts. Here are some suggestions:
Implement CAPTCHA: Integrate CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) during the registration process. This can help verify that the user is a real person and not a bot.
Email verification: Require users to verify their email addresses during the registration process. This can help ensure that the accounts are created by real individuals.
Activity-based account pruning: Regularly monitor user activity and remove accounts that have been inactive for a certain period of time. This can help keep the user base updated and remove dormant or unused accounts.
Implement user behavior analysis: Utilize algorithms to analyze user behavior patterns and identify suspicious activities that may indicate bot accounts. This can help flag and remove potential bot accounts.
Two-factor authentication (2FA): Enable 2FA as an additional layer of security for user accounts. This can help prevent unauthorized access and reduce the likelihood of bot activity.
Regular security audits: Conduct regular security audits to identify and address any vulnerabilities that may be exploited by bots. This can help strengthen the overall security of the platform.
By implementing these measures, we can significantly reduce the presence of bots and inactive accounts, improving the overall user experience on Lemmy.
And that it's properly formatted lol. But serious, the biggest spam I see here are users complaining about bots without evidence that they're a real problem. I believe a lot of them are simply scrapping reddit and posting that content here or are otherwise folks who don't want to see redditors migrating. My take is: Welcome aboard everyone! Make an account and say hey wherever you like to become an active user.
Oh absolutely. Always find it ironic that on reddit people are so quick to accuse each other of being bots and shills when in reality the real bots are easy to spot, and the real shills are busy doing AMAs.
And it's deleted ha. These sorta "bots" are just users trying to be smart and relevant by just copy/pasting what results they get from ChatGPT. Gj calling that out.
The web app wefwef.app is actually a really great alternative to apollo for lemmy! I'm using it right now on android, and while it does feel weird with the ui differences it has gestures and the same interface and generally feels really good.
Yeah once the first hits we're gonna see a huge spike in users. The growth right now is just from people who deleted their accounts in protest on the 12th.
Most never stopped using reddit, but rather used reddit in unsavory ways. Goating all the new rules from blasphemy to nsfw to indefinitely private has had a lot of effect. I mean InterestingAsFuck still has no mods after the admins axed the whole sub. They're not ready for modless chaos. We won't see them double back until possible August, then it'll be too late and the folks will not want to come back. That's my prediction.
Yup, came here to say that as well. it’s al bots. The active users graph is much more realistic.
And I’ve been seeing some…odd looking… comments recently from users at instances known for being mostly bots. Some of these comments really look AI generated, and have a suspicious number of upvotes.
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