 Fediverse user growth jumped to \~50'000'000 users. What happened ?](https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/951/740/282/234/899/original/430bac37e4e531e7.png){kind=link}
@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/
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.