From 3000 daily active users on June 1, 2023 to 47500 on June 26, 2023.
According to Lemmy’s documentation, “An active user is someone who has posted or commented on our instance or community within the last given time frame.”
Sources:
- https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=30
- https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html
EDIT: check out this link for a list of lemmy apps: https://lemmy.world/post/465785
this keeps getting touted but isn’t it a huge number of bots causing the rise?
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.
This is just really disappointing and gross. Is there any way to not have bots absolutely everywhere?
Yeah, it’s absolutely disappointing and gross. Bots have been actively probing for obscure instances without registration validation and flocking to them. Good thing the top real lemmy instances (like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, sh.itjust.works, lemmy.ca) have been much more vigilant about that.
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.
Are those instances defederating from the bot-filled ones?
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).
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.
Require that membership in the Fediverse be approved?
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.
My understanding is that’s causing the rise in accounts (2.5m!) not the active accounts data
Everyone online is a bot except you.
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”.
If they’re like NewsUser and Botittest, the bots will flood this place when they start. Even though these two good bots have made this place a lot more usable, it feels like that’s what the “All” thread has become. Just news.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the news feed, but now I understand why it became a separate thread in Reddit.
Whichever the instances that lowered their guard were, there will be a day they will have to be defederated. It’ll be a test for this place, for sure.
Same boat as you. It was your comment that made me realize the one filling my feed with nothing but news was all only linkbot and when I blocked it out of curiosity, I could see memes and user posts again. It was posting so often it was literally drowning out every other subject.
I think it’s nice to keep up with news on a platform that doesn’t seem so US-centric and full of vitriol, and I’ll be sad to see it go. Might turn the block on and off. But I’m already subbed to a news community.