Lemmy's total users continues to soar from 240k yesterday to 360k today! Basically quadrupling in the past 4 days

MicroWave@lemmy.world to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 150 points –
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I love Lemmy, but as others have already said, the vast majority of these signups are likely bots. Pretty spooky.

Bots and multi-accounts. I had one reddit account with no alts. Here I have like 6 accounts because of all the federated / non federated bs.

I can't imagine being that unlucky with your instances, maybe you're running into bugs or the less intuitive parts of Lemmy (like how links to posts and communities don't work how you'd expect them to)

It was mostly bugs/stability issues for me.

I created a lemmy account, but I've never actually been able to log into it. I even tried creating another account on lemmy, no dice.

Created a kbin account, but then found out that they were defederated temporarily due to the influx, and they had some really annoying cloudflare stuff on

Created a fedia account, but posts from other instances were delayed by like 6-8 hours, and fedia itself was (and still is) a relatively small instance.

Kbin has since refederated so it's working the best for me.

Couldn't figure out a good way to get mastadon to mesh with the ui of other instances so I created a mastadon account. Then I realized I'd gone down a rabbit hole of porn so my mastadon feed was taken over by nsfw stuff, so I made a new non-horny mastadon account.

That's seven. If beehaw ever defederates from kbin, I might make an eighth so I can participate there (unless fedia starts becoming better at updating).

3 of them were defederated by beehaw but I also have a beehaw account and then 2 others just in case... But I am sure I'm not the only one like this. So the total lemmy numbers are probably inflated... not that reddit numbers aren't also inflated.

Im a newbie, why do you have so many accounts? Isn't it bothersome to switch between them for whatever you are using them for?

To each their own I guess. It's not bothersome for me to switch accounts as I normally browse each lemmy locally to make sure I'm seeing as many of the comments as possible. I never really subscribed to the "subscribe/follow" feature of reddit. I liked my front page and all my niche communities separate so when I want to read about xxx I go to xxx subreddit and read all the top posts then move to my next subreddit. To many things fall through the cracks of the front page IMO. But to each their own, again. There is no reason to run lemmy like I do vs one account if it is working for you as is.

I have a similar thing going. Have 3 accounts, one on lemmy.world, one on kbin.social, and one on beehaw.org.

Yeah, same here. I created one on lemmy.one... realized lemmy.world is open and has more traffic right now, so I created a new one here. I also have a kbin user for similar reasons. But still, the content flow does seem to be slowly increasing.

why would you think they're all bots?

There was supposedly a post the other day about a bug that would let people creat a ton of accounts using a bot. My understanding is that pretty much the next day the amount of new users increased immensely, so the timing of it so seems a little suspect

The number of users increased immensely the next day because Hexbear.net migrated to upstream Lemmy and their users/stats started being tracked. This newest wave of users does seem to me like bots, specially because they are signing up to instances where little to no activity is happening, but who knows.