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

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

People? No. Bots and alts? Absolutely.

Wow, 84 tabs

More info here: https://lemmy.ml/post/1391903

There was a spam sign up attack recently.

Bots and spammers coming out in force. Wondering how Lemmy and the Fediverse is going to deal with that down the road.

I actually signed up on three different instances trying to find one with the best ping and best administration. I’ve posted in all three so I’m one user counted as three.

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.