https://the-federation.info/platform/73 says for lemmy we have: 1,073,211 Users

It also says that: Last month users: 38897

Which is 2 orders of magnitude of a difference. If you look at the list of instances there ones like https://the-federation.info/node/details/48405 which have 50k users and 10 active last month users.

That means almost all of the 1 milion users are fake users.

I’m seeing people celebrating every 100k users every couple of hours without realizing this.

  • Kresten@feddit.dkEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    It’s so annoying that people are already trying to create fake users. Doing so on a federated network is straight up malicious :/

  • dystop@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    It’s not bullshit, it’s because of two reasons:

    First, “Active last month” refers to users who have posted a comment in the last month. Every site like this has a large number of lurkers. A good rule of thumb is 10% of subscribers/users actually post/comment/participate. So 350-400k “legitimate” users sounds like the right ballpark.

    Second, the numbers are so high because there has been a known bot attack. A few instances didn’t have email verification/captchas enabled so it was very easy to sign up for accounts very quickly. Some instances went from 500-800 users, to 10,000 users overnight.