@fediverse Fediverse user growth jumped to ~50’000’000 users. What happened ?
The FediDB *Fediverse User Growth* graph shows a significant jump in user count in February. Software distribution is also 81% *other*, and the biggest server is fediverse.hanbitgaram.com with 39 million users ! What happened ?
https://fedidb.org/
While I’m not entirely sure wat it actually means, the message you get on that site right now might be the reason (some kind of experiment gone wrong artificially inflating the numbers):
Nice.
I thought it was someone making a bunch of bot accounts for the future…
Can someone do a ELI5 on this?
Someone was testing a program they made that links Lemmy / Mastadon (ActivityPub) to other services, think threads or Reddit.
When they ran the program it created all the dummy accounts and published it to the Fediverse making it look like a lot of new users joined.