Asklemmy

I think some of it comes down to admins who left their (small) instances open (no captcha, no application, no email validation) not knowing how bad an idea that currently is given the maturity level of Lemmy and the (very recent) influx of bots. I am reaching out to the admins of the fastest growing servers according to FediDB if it looks suspicious (based on growth rate, participation rate of their users, and if the content posted by users). In many of these cases we are talking thousands of new accounts in the past few days on instances that have single-digit active daily/weekly users.

So far the responses I have gotten have been appreciative and the admins are taking action, but not everyone has responded. Also the tooling to find and delete such accounts is pretty lacking as far as I can tell.

There has been a big surge in bot accounts

https://lemmy.ml/post/1391903

Basically many of the newer instances allowed sign ups with no bot protection

This is why we can't have nice things and need to deal with CAPTCHA and email verification etc..

Did you miss the news about Reddit pissing off all their users, many of whom are now looking for alternatives?

there's no karma to farm. there's no algorithm to game. the best they can do is spam.

What are the bot accounts being used for? I haven't noticed any posts made by bots (unless you guys are all ChatGPT and I'm the only human here)