• MicroWave@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      The bots have inflated the total users count (around 2.4 million), but they aren’t active (yet). So for now active users is a recommended way to measure the fediverse. But once the bots start posting, we’ll have to find another way to track real user activity.

          • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Which is a shame, because in theory it seems like creating a self-hosted instance for your personal account has a lot of advantages (not worrying about the host doing something screwy or abandoning the instance, having full control over who you federate with, being able to customize the interface, etc.)

            But that may end up going the way of self-hosted email servers, where differentiating yourself from a spam server becomes impossible and everyone ends up on the equivalent of gmail.

              • Candelestine@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                My (different person here) take is it’s probing behavior. Who benefits? Anti-reddit-protest trolls want to see this fail, and some could have the resources. Savvy criminal organizations see potential profit. Major tech companies see at least a research opportunity at minimal expense. White hats want to find and raise awareness of vulnerabilities.

                Only governments would really have no major motive beyond the usual surveillance of a social space. So I think the question should really be, who’s not doing it? Because if people aren’t wholesale fucking around yet, they’ll start very soon. It’s only the savvy or lucky that are aware of us still, but that will not be true for long. Snowball is rolling now, that’s pretty plain to see.

                I mean, we’re just a big and growing pile of consumers. What else do you do with those?

            • MicroWave@lemmy.worldOP
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              1 year ago

              Yeah, those instances are defederating from the bot-filled ones, but new ones are still popping up (although seems to be slowing down a little for now).

        • NotAPenguin@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          I don’t see how that could be done, the bot owners can always just spin up their own new instance where they control sign up requirements.

          Other instances can then defederate from the spam instance but they can quickly spin up a new one.

          Gonna be interesting to see how it’s solved.

            • NotAPenguin@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              The fediverse is decentralized, anyone can start their own lemmy/kbin/mastodon/whatever server and make an account they just approve themselves.

              If you mean some kind of global approval then that destroys the whole point of the fediverse.

        • MicroWave@lemmy.worldOP
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          1 year ago

          Because people have been monitoring bot infected instances and have not seen them post or comment (yet).

    • AussieTom@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      My understanding is that’s causing the rise in accounts (2.5m!) not the active accounts data

    • hardypart@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      They made the general user number explode for sure, but those bots are not really active yet, so they don’t count as “active users”.