~~Almost~~ OVER 90% of the accounts on lemmy are now bot accounts!!
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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
What I wonder is: what's the motivation for these bot network attackers? Is it some script kiddie doing it for lulz? A reddit "nationalist"? Russia and China getting an early start on propaganda tools for the newer platforms?
My guess is they'll be used to upvote/downvote things that the botnet operators are paid to promote/suppress. SEO for the fediverse basically
Jokes on them, we can't sort by upvotes and downvotes in most cases anyway
SEO and propaganda / misinformation campaigns
My guess is the last mixed with the new users coming from reddit
Also, if it's easy to do it makes sense to have a bunch of accounts as assets in a nascent platform. If lemmy does take off, you already have a bunch of bot accounts to sell advertising/propaganda. Whereas if you wait until later it might be harder or more expe sjve to generate those accounts.
Let's hope that it's just trolling and bots won't be put into use. I hope owners will mass delete them later because as long they exist they will be a risk for the rest of the platform.