• 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.

      • MicroWave@lemmy.worldOP
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • 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.

          • 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.