fediverse) Fediverse user growth jumped to \~50'000'000 users. What happened ?

Fediverse@lemmy.world – 240 points – 4 months ago

@fediverse Fediverse user growth jumped to ~50'000'000 users. What happened ?
The FediDB *Fediverse User Growth* graph shows a significant jump in user count in February. Software distribution is also 81% *other*, and the biggest server is fediverse.hanbitgaram.com with 39 million users ! What happened ?
https://fedidb.org/

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While I’m not entirely sure wat it actually means, the message you get on that site right now might be the reason (some kind of experiment gone wrong artificially inflating the numbers):

I was creating an implementation for the activity pub instance service transfer, but it seems to have spread far. We are very sorry to those who have experienced inconvenience.

All temporarily used data has been removed and all data has been removed. The figures in the data will soon converge to zero.

I trawled unintentionally.

Nice.

I thought it was someone making a bunch of bot accounts for the future...

Can someone do a ELI5 on this?

Someone was testing a program they made that links Lemmy / Mastadon (ActivityPub) to other services, think threads or Reddit.

When they ran the program it created all the dummy accounts and published it to the Fediverse making it look like a lot of new users joined.