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.

  • hmancuso@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    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.

    • 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
          0·
          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.

  • Spectator@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Should the instances that responded to you be refederrated? I’m pretty sure I saw some of them on lemmy.world’s block list. I think it would be sad for these small servers to not realize they are, in fact, not connected to the greater fediverse. On the other hand, if you’re an admin, and you don’t know what you’re doing to the point of not knowing your server was infected by hundreds of thousands of bots, maybe it’s too dangerous to refed.

    • Ryumast3r@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Everyone has to start somewhere. We should reward honest effort instead of punishing honest effort but ignorance.

      • El Barto@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        Ignorance is not an excuse.

        A baby dies because you fed it 10 glasses of wine. You skip jail because you had no idea wine was not good for babies? Sure.

        • Ryumast3r@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          Did you just compare letting non-active bots on a server to killing babies? Okay if that’s the comparison you really want to go with, I guess.

          It’s very easy to sit on a high horse and say you’ve never had a negative impact due to your ignorance, when your own ignorance might include things that you don’t know are detrimental to others.

          Are you perfect? If 7 billion people analyze your actions will none of them find you at fault? Because if even a single one does, then by your own standard, you should never be allowed a second chance by anyone.

          • El Barto@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            1 year ago

            Oh, I perfectly know I won’t be liked by everyone, and I also know I’m not perfect. Nobody is.

            That doesn’t mean that we must reward effort “in spite of ignorance” when the consequences are horrid.

            I’m all for enlightening the ignorant. But in this specific case, if they help spread vitriol and misinformation, then sorry. No excuse. It’s 2023, do your homework.

  • dreikelvin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Suggestion: what if there was a lemmy instance solely for reporting malicious lemmy/fediverse servers? I’ve read some stuff about FBI crackdown and mastodon instances containing questionable material. Wouldn’t it be gret to have some kind of federated “registry” of all the bad actors out there? I am pretty clueless, but would that help?

    • gabe [he/him]@literature.cafeEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Might work. Like a lemmy admin coordination hub instance? On mastodon there is “fediblock,” which is what you’re describing.

      I do know that there is lemmyadmin.site currently, but it’s not extremely active as far as I can tell.