Are these numbers really true?

WreckingBANG@lemmy.ml to Fediverse@lemmy.ml – 5 points –

Is this Total User Counter true? It seems kind of wrong because the Graph is only at 300k and i cannot imagine that we grew 200k people in the last 4 hours.

The Website Url is: https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse

8

i cannot imagine that we grew 200k people in the last 4 hours.

People? No. Bots and alts? Absolutely.

Total users != active users. People seem to have a thing for multiple accounts

Click through to the top-growing new instance, lemmy.elest.io

It has 12k registered users, which is like 1/3 or lemmy.world. But it only has 4 users online, or 0.1% of what's online at lemmy.world right now. Parapheum has a similar massive imbalance in registered vs active users.

I haven't seen a satisfying description of what's going on here, but one thing that isn't going on is hundreds of thousands of users registering on ONLY these new instances and then not using Lemmy at all. These are synthetic accounts. Are they malicious? I dunno. They're weird at least. There's an admin listed on the frontpage of each instance, might be worth asking directly.

If you filter the modlog by banned accounts you can see hundreds or thousands of accounts getting banned from the same instances: https://lemmy.world/modlog.

I also see another commenter posted a link with more context. So yeah, looks like spambots in force.