I looked at the lemmy stats again today like the last few days (since the 1st of July), apparently tonight there has been another wave of bot signups.:
Lemmy: 1,555,395 overall users (+ 2363)
Kbin: 55,201 overall users (+ 433)
Active last 30 days:
Lemmy: 56,859 users (+ 1142)
Kbin: 55,099 users (+ 331)
^ 2023-07-02 20:15:00 CEST
Lemmy: 2,179,081 overall users (+ 623686, bots)
Kbin: 55,863 (+ 764)
Active last 30 days:
Lemmy: 59,438 (+ 2579)
Kbin: 55,532 (+ 433)
^ 2023-07-03 13:30:00 CEST
Of course “tonight” refers to tonight in central european summer time so it probably was more middle-of-the-day for you.
If you go to the site I linked at the beginning and sort by “Total users” you can see instances with 80000 users and 1 active user for example.
Open signups should be prohibited and affected instances should do something against the botted accounts or defederate. New instances should at the very least start using captchas and email verification.
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I host a bunch of websites for normal small businesses many of them have contact forms and all of them have captcha.
We’ve seen a steady rise in spam that gets through it over the last year or so. I don’t have any concrete numbers at hand, but we’ve heard from customers that they used to get a few spam replies once in a while before but get 10-20 a day over prolonged periods of time now.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re aproaching a point where computers are better at solving captchas than human.
If you really want to see this, go try to make a post on 4chan.
They have a captcha system that’s so hard to solve I think that a significant percentage of people probably simply fail to get through it. There are browser extensions and stuff to help solve it that actually prove it’s easier for a robot to figure it out than a human.
Traditional captchas have been easier for computers than humans for a while. I imagine these “pick all matching” captchas aren’t far behind.
The main reason to do captchas nowadays is to keep the door closed. Of course they do not deter more expert-ish people, but opportunity “hackers” aka script kiddies. If you’re not using captchas you’re just inviting them to run a script on your site. Big sites use captchas, there’s no reason for the fediverse to not use captchas. We don’t need to be “special” in regards to security.
That’s why I always liked the captcha that Genshin had on login, just sliding the puzzle piece onto the correct part of the picture. Very easy for a human, has the basest of security against lazy bots.
Which is funny because these captchas are designed to train an AI, like self-driving cars. So the AI is now training itself, ready for a big divergence.