I think it's either bots or some spooky spammers that are falsely reporting the number of users. e.g. lemmy.k6qw.com currently claims to have 44k users with no posts...

[–] MicroWave@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah that's a bad instance.

[–] memchr@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

There are many more bad instances like this in the statistics. I think it will become a problem for Lemmy sooner or later.

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Probably! But in the mean time I bet some real people will join just because they see the numbers going up.

[–] house_of_questions@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I believe instances can block other instances entirely, right? Or have I misunderstood that? This would mean none of those bots in there could ever post in our threads here. I'm sure there will be cooperation between the instances on this.

[–] memchr@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

yes, it's called defederation.

[–] lemme_at_it@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

The admins of those instances could just look at the DB, and DROP all the users who post nothing. Those IP addressees could also be added to a shareable ban list. CAPTCHA needs to be added to sign-up without delay. I'm sure the experienced Lemmy admins can help out the newcomers with this. Pruning of the tree needs to begin now, before it becomes too busy to make large deletions to the DB on-the-fly.

[–] AtomicRobotMan0101@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

I think with the extreme novelty, there will be LOTS of devs trying out new scripts and auto-doings.

I suspect that will be learned pretty fast, published to a group, then many of the bots will simply die out.