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4 days before reddit's 3rd party app shutdown, Lemmy daily active users has skyrocketed 1400% this month
(lemmy.world)
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
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 seeking out instances without registration validation and flocking to them. The top real 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.
wait how did we conclude that the bots aren't active yet?
Because people have been monitoring bot infected instances and have not seen them post or comment (yet).