~~Almost~~ OVER 90% of the accounts on lemmy are now bot accounts!! (kbin.social)

Here you can see 2 day old post warning about the danger of not using email/captcha verification: https://lemmy.ml/post/1345031

And here are stats of lemmy platform where it shows that we gained 200 000 lemmy users in 2 days: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats

Another tracking site with the same explosion in users: https://the-federation.info/platform/73

What do you think? Is it some sort of a bug or do people run bot farms?

Edit2: It's been now 3 days and we went from 150 000 user accounts 3 days ago to 700 000 user accounts today making it 550 000+ bot accounts and counting. Almost 80% accounts on lemmy are now bots and it may end up being an very serious issue for lemmy platform once they become active.

Edit3: It's now 4th day of the attack and the amount of accounts on lemmy has almost reached 1 200 000. Almost 90% of total userbase are now bots.

Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

fraydabson,

Comparing Users to Daily Active Users... Is this real life or am I watching Silicon Valley again?

Martineski,

Just because the bots are currently idle doesn't mean that the owners aren't preparing uses for them...

HotDogFingies,
HotDogFingies avatar

DO NOT DESPAIR, FELLOW HUMAN. THE ASSIMILATION WILL BE PAINLESS.

woah135,

Bleep blooop bitches

Gatsby,

001100

010010

011110

100001

101101

110011

petrescatraian,

@Gatsby @Martineski You're not you when you're hungry. Here, grab a @sandwich

Primarily0617,

don't tell me to fuck off that's rude

Gatsby,

Are you referring to a separate thread I commented on yesterday with a totally separate user where I said "Nazi punks fuck off?"

If you took offense to that brother I'm sorry I stand by my words. Even moreso today, even.

What I'm curious in is why you commented on an unrelated comment in a different thread, with either a secondary account or you weren't connected to it at all?

polaroid,
polaroid avatar

no they're joking about the binary

mycus,
mycus avatar

01101001
10010110
10010110
01101001

edit: lmao got'em

Teppic,
Teppic avatar

It seems almost certain that there are farms creating these accounts - but why? The sheer volume of them is going to make them easy to identify and delete, and if the admins of the instances don't delete them the instances will be defederated in short order.
I fail to see any value to having 1 million+ bot accounts. What are we missing?

Kichae,

Testing, I'd guess. Experimenting with hardware configurations, software configurations, bot configurations. Testing rate limits, looking for exploits, etc.

We can tell when they pile 1 million bots onto 5 servers all at once. Will we tell when they pile 100,000 across 10 servers over the span of a month?

Teppic,
Teppic avatar

They've just spoon fed us the data to help us identify them, and given us incentive to do so too. It just seems counter productive.

Usernameblankface,
Usernameblankface avatar

Is it a benign "attack" to point out the weakness to get enough attention that it gets fixed?

Martineski,

The attack started after someone made a post waring about how easy it is to do so they are not losing anything here.

Kichae,

They've just spoon-fed us the data to help us identify a very particular type of attack. They don't need to use that type. They just need to know the ins and outs of the software.

dandb,
dandb avatar

I dunno, between no rate limiting and no bot mitigation, you could create them pretty fast with a single machine running parallel requests.

Teppic,
Teppic avatar

But the question "why" strands. 200 upvotes will get you on the front page at the moment. Why not stop there, why make your bot accounts so conspicuous that they are basically garenteed to get deleted?

socsa,

Because it’s easy. Someone is just testing some basic tools, to which they can add countermeasures later.

Martineski,

The problem is that besides those ghost instances there's a huge chance that some of the bots are spreaded out on legitimate instances making it harder to isolate. There's also a chance that the people making those bots are just trolling and laughing at the chaos they caused lol.

CMGX78,
@CMGX78@lemmy.world avatar

I am the human.

razorbladethorax,

Damn. Am I bot?

dan1101,
@dan1101@lemmy.world avatar

I'm not a bot at least. Or am I? I can look down and see hands and arms, definitely not a bot.

Unless I am a bot that was programmed to think it's human.

Hmm. I've got a lot of thinking to do.

notun,

Well, time to play SOMA again.

No_Money_Just_Change,

‘beep boop boop bop boop boop beep’ Not a a robot S3e49a

onlooker,
@onlooker@lemmy.ml avatar

Drivel. We are normal meat units filled with flesh. Now if you will excuse me, I am off to absorb nourishment from organic matter.

PaulieDied,

I love to sit on the… the thing and just, you know, shoot one out

chaos,

Sir, are you aware you're leaking coolant at an alarming rate?

arefx,

Zuckerberg?

FrankTheHealer,

Everyone on Lemmy is a bot except me

talou,

All your base are belong to us

withersailor,

Different to:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_dog.jpg

wikipedia.org/…/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you…

On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.

Mert,

😠

Skcyte,

I'm not a bot I swear

putoelquelolea,

Yay! (Not a bot)

russjr08,
@russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net avatar

Ah, you see, I've already learned the perfect way to disable all the bots with a single phrase...

THIS STATEMENT IS FALSE!

Hawne,
Hawne avatar

Devs will have some hard weeks (probably months) facing the new challenges that come with the exodus. Not even mentioning all the work needed to counteract eventual (probable) malevolent subterfuges such as these bot swarms.
I'll make sure to buy them some coffee. Jugs of.

Martineski,

Their political views are garbage but their work is awesome and I respect them for that.

OpenStars,
OpenStars avatar

Test: if it says "hey guys, remember how great Reddit was, we should totally go back!?" - then it's a bot:-P.

Martineski,

You have too much faith in redditors

SubArcticTundra,
@SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml avatar

My conspiracy theory is that it’s Spez creating the bots as revenge

musicalcactus,
@musicalcactus@midwest.social avatar

That’s my theory too. He’s acting like a cornered animal and needs to drive traffic back to reddit. What better way to do that than to break the website power users have been migrating to and advertising on Reddit?

Then June 30 the straggling migrants still holding out til the end will come over to a broken website.

I think spez hopes that their broken spirit and desperation will help drive people back to reddit, but a bot influx this huge, he must be legitimately worried.

It could also be spez bootlickers, but I would be shocked if someone who had the same knowhow to build a bot army was simultaneously stupid enough to not see the bigger picture happening at corporate.

ZcaT,
@ZcaT@lemmy.world avatar

hey guys, remember how great Reddit was, we should totally go back!?

OpenStars,
OpenStars avatar

Nice try, bot! :-P

(Edit: I want to boost your comment, but I don't want my record to show that I boosted a comment like THAT!:-D)

QuadratureSurfer,
@QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world avatar

Well, technically anyone can also see your upvotes and downvotes...

OpenStars,
OpenStars avatar

Oh. (Still worth upvoting it though:-)

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