cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/1823812
This is an update to my previous post about suspicious inactive accounts on a handful of instances: (https://sh.itjust.works/post/998307).
I ended up messaging the admins at the 16 instances show in the attached image. I pointed out their wild user numbers, and referenced the lemmy.ninja post detailing how that instance scrubbed suspicious accounts from their user database.
6 admins responded. They had all noticed the odd accounts and either thought the numbers were wrong, or weren't sure how to purge the suspicious accounts without nuking their databases. In the end they managed to delete a combined total of about 338k dormant accounts from their instances. (One of the instances seems to have gone down since then.)
I never received a reply from the other 10 instance admins, though 8 of those 10 instances appear to be down (as of 27 July 2023). 2 instances are still up and unchanged.
Between the actively removed accounts and the downed instances, this represents a loss of 930,004 inactive Lemmy accounts!
You can see the drop in the graphs on The Federation. The total number of Lemmy accounts has been cut in half over the past 3 weeks, from a peak of 2.18M to today's 1.09M. The change is mostly from these 16 instances.
I have to admit, I did not expect such a large change when I started this! Hopefully this bodes well for Lemmy's future as a place where actual humans interact, rather than a cesspool of automated comments and upvote/downvote brigading.
That's all I have for now. Keep your stick on the ice; we're all in this together.
That's actually really interesting. What's the purpose of so many inactive accounts at once?
Seems to be enough to have a few of them, and not a million accounts since it clearly will rise suspicion... :)
Very good that you found them. Fascinating.
Maybe an attempt to try and make the fediverse look more active than it was back then, to get headlines about how it has explosive growth etc. It was June and everything really took off then.
That really is the million dollar question. I don't know. My fear is that they were intended to sit unnoticed until someone had a malicious use for them. Maybe to mass upvote/downvote certain content to make it more visible. Or to become active at an opportune time to make divisive posts and comments. I saw many accounts like that on Reddit; they show no activity for years and then suddenly come alive and spew garbage. I'm sure we'll see some of that on Lemmy next year since there will be a major election in the US. Though hopefully less since a bunch of suspicious dormant accounts are now gone.
It's a smart move for a spammer to create a lot of accounts in the early days of a platform, before more restrictive signups with mail verification, phone verification or captchas are in place. Look at how difficult it has become to register on Twitter or Facebook.
Perhaps something akin to this, sleeper cells for some nefarious purpose, e.g. influencing elections.
I'm thinking of making inactive accounts so I can create communities on other instances. I wanna make an old trek community on the Star Trek instance, but I wanna moderate it from this instance. So I would make an account, make the community, and transfer ownership.
Could be as simple as reserving popular usernames too.
But I think putting all the Star Trek content on one instance is a neat idea and I want to participate in that idea
I can still make a community on the star trek instance from my own instance? How?
I’ve got a couple accounts on various instances as backup, since we can’t exactly transfer accounts across instances just yet.