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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
Generally speaking I think people want to interact with other human beings, not bots.
Then there’s the questionable morality of it. Companies can profit off bots scraping our info.
If you don’t want your info scraped, don’t put it online. Companies don’t even need accounts to scrape data, since Lemmy is fundamentally public.
This is why I said questionable morality of it. I have my own opinions.
What’s the point of getting the data if you can’t advertise to those people? There is no ad space in the fediverse and it’s easy to defederate bot infested instances that might be trying to advertise through vote boosting.