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.
You say there's nothing thing to worry about because you're narrowing your focus to one specific week of high activity. If this is the week the Reddit API changes took effect, this is the week I migrated over and I haven't logged into Reddit since. However, there has been some growing pains and with intermittent issues on different instances, I ended up creating accounts on multiple servers that week. I've only commented using this one so far but I appreciate having the others logged in on Jerboa so I can jump between them. Sometimes this is necessary when servers go down temporarily. So far, these other accounts are just for lurking but they can clearly be captured in your net of possible "bots". I think you are greatly underestimating the number of legit accounts you are sweeping up. One thing I have not seen from your posts is any evidence from of malicious activity on these accounts. Therefore, I don't agree with pressuring admins to terminate these accounts in bulk. I would prefer to see action based on truth rather than baseless speculation. What's wrong with removing accounts only if they ever become a problem?