cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/1823812

This is an update to my previous post about suspicious inactive accounts on a handful of instances: (https://sh.itjust.works/post/998307).

I ended up messaging the admins at the 16 instances show in the attached image. I pointed out their wild user numbers, and referenced the lemmy.ninja post detailing how that instance scrubbed suspicious accounts from their user database.

6 admins responded. They had all noticed the odd accounts and either thought the numbers were wrong, or weren’t sure how to purge the suspicious accounts without nuking their databases. In the end they managed to delete a combined total of about 338k dormant accounts from their instances. (One of the instances seems to have gone down since then.)

I never received a reply from the other 10 instance admins, though 8 of those 10 instances appear to be down (as of 27 July 2023). 2 instances are still up and unchanged.

Between the actively removed accounts and the downed instances, this represents a loss of 930,004 inactive Lemmy accounts!

You can see the drop in the graphs on The Federation. The total number of Lemmy accounts has been cut in half over the past 3 weeks, from a peak of 2.18M to today’s 1.09M. The change is mostly from these 16 instances.

I have to admit, I did not expect such a large change when I started this! Hopefully this bodes well for Lemmy’s future as a place where actual humans interact, rather than a cesspool of automated comments and upvote/downvote brigading.

That’s all I have for now. Keep your stick on the ice; we’re all in this together.

    • kionay@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      The transparency may be my very favorite part of Lemmy. It’s almost feels like these people are invested in it’s success instead of it’s profit.

  • Moracrema@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Those are crazy numbers… WTF?

    If that’s is the reality for Lemmy, I can’t imagine the number of bots giant social networks have. Crazy.

    Thank you for your work.

    • U de Recife@lemmy.sdfeu.orgEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      That’s the thing, right? Those giant networks’ admins surely know how inflated their userbase is. They surely know that a lot of the activity is bot faked/manipulated.

      But since the end goal of those networks is generate traffic to sell something (ads, user data), they never purge the bots. They need fake engagement. They might even promote it. The human user is just being used (Cf. Stallman’s use of this term).

  • WarmSoda@lemm.eeEnglish
    31·
    1 year ago

    What are qualifications for being an active account? I didn’t see any details in the other thread about it either, just the graphs. Is it just post/comment creation? Is it page views? Log ins? Does voting up or down register an account as Active?

    If it’s only post/comments then you’re possibly deleting a bunch of lurkers too.

  • hmancuso@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Thank you for your efforts to keep this place clean and civil, and especially for the transparency in describing how you’ve dealt with such annoyances. You have my respect.

  • mrmanager@lemmy.todayEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    That’s actually really interesting. What’s the purpose of so many inactive accounts at once?

    Seems to be enough to have a few of them, and not a million accounts since it clearly will rise suspicion… :)

    Very good that you found them. Fascinating.

    Maybe an attempt to try and make the fediverse look more active than it was back then, to get headlines about how it has explosive growth etc. It was June and everything really took off then.

    • kersploosh@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      What’s the purpose of so many inactive accounts at once?

      That really is the million dollar question. I don’t know. My fear is that they were intended to sit unnoticed until someone had a malicious use for them. Maybe to mass upvote/downvote certain content to make it more visible. Or to become active at an opportune time to make divisive posts and comments. I saw many accounts like that on Reddit; they show no activity for years and then suddenly come alive and spew garbage. I’m sure we’ll see some of that on Lemmy next year since there will be a major election in the US. Though hopefully less since a bunch of suspicious dormant accounts are now gone.

      • muelltonne@feddit.deEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        It’s a smart move for a spammer to create a lot of accounts in the early days of a platform, before more restrictive signups with mail verification, phone verification or captchas are in place. Look at how difficult it has become to register on Twitter or Facebook.

      • HardlightCereal@lemmy.worldEnglish
        01·
        1 year ago

        I’m thinking of making inactive accounts so I can create communities on other instances. I wanna make an old trek community on the Star Trek instance, but I wanna moderate it from this instance. So I would make an account, make the community, and transfer ownership.

  • U de Recife@lemmy.sdfeu.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I want to celebrate two things. 1. Your awareness of the potential dangers looming over the fediverse. 2. Your proactive attitude curtailing the problem at its root. From one human to another, thank you!

    • thessnake03@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Probably happening to some degree already, unless no robots is checked. No way lemmy jumps as high as reddit in seo for random things for a long while

      • YⓄ乙 @aussie.zoneEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        Naa…I think instance admins have to let the crawlers index the content. Not sure if Admins have enabled it

        • Historical_General@lemmy.worldEnglish
          07·
          1 year ago

          A major advantage of the old place was that you could search up keywords and find a discussion on it. When I wasn’t browsing, the other times that I’d end up using it was for when I needed to look stuff up.

          I’m not sure what the pros cons ratio is though.

  • SmoothSurfer@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Dude wtf, there are relatively many fucking servers which have well over thousands of inactive users. I checked some and it seems the mods of them are just posting under 5 posts on some other servers and than creating some communities in their own server and then leave quietly. Thats too sus… It may be too much paranoiac to think that there is more going about those servers but I just cant stop thinking it is too absurd

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Some of them are probably lurkers. Might be good for Lemmy to store the last login time, so admins can consider that when purging accounts.

  • z00s@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    actual humans interact, rather than a cesspool of automated comments and upvote/downvote brigading.

    Thank you! That’s why I left the other place. You’re doing God’s work, anon.