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I feel like there's been a sudden influx on new active aussie.zone users. Coincidence, or did something happen?

I know other instances have grown a lot due to media attention, reddit making silly decisions or banning communities. Did anything similar happen or is this just a thing that thinged?

Edit: having a closer look, some of the names I thought were new are people who've had accounts for years but have mostly been posting to other instances so I didn't see them. So maybe I'm only seeing them on higher-scoring local posts

35 comments

  • It's a steady two or so new accounts per day. Occasionally Reddit does something silly and we get a wave of them, but that hasn't happened for a few months.

  • Whoever has been spamming Lemmy with that bot, davriellelouna or whatever they've called it this week, i think has deteriorated the salience of discussions to a degree. But these accounts a getting tagged really quickly in the last week, i suppose this is something Lodion and Nath are doing in the background. Cheers for your efforts admins!

    • I have literally never seen that bot in action. I saw a heap of deleted posts in a thread once, that was it.

      Whatever they're doing to prevent it being obnoxious is working I reckon!

      • Well, okay. You know more about this stuff than i, it might not be a bot. If you view by Local theres usually a post in the top ten most active still up from their latest account.

        Theres someone that keeps launching new lemmy.world accounts and spamming some AZ communities. A look at their history and you can see they're doing the same with British and European communities as well. The accounts when left to run, quickly reach the hundreds of posts, with only a few comments so there seems to be someone actively controlling it to some degree? Some of the comments were... interesting. They don't seem malicious, from what i've seen at least, but definitely spammy, which can undercut quality of discussions.

        So i don't know if this is a bot or not, but its kinda insane behaviour, relentless, if its a person doing all of it.

  • afaik we’re still around 150~ visits per day, it’s just us in here 😄 i suspect until the admins agree to list the site on google/bing growth will be negative/sideways

    • We're pretty protective of our ~500ish regulars. We are not a large instance, but our users are very engaged. We don't want them to be drowned out by a massive influx of new accounts utterly shifting the vibe of the site overnight.

      It's already a problem of us both being Perth-based: we're weak on admin coverage first thing Eastern Time as that tends to be 3am-7am here. An explosion of users and an early morning incident is something it's just easier to avoid.

      At the end of the day, we're a pair of nerdy full-time family guys doing this as a hobby. We aren't interested in monetising this site or making it our jobs.

      • Are donations still meeting costs? You say not monetising, but it shouldnt be a charity.

      • We're pretty protective of our ~500ish regulars. We are not a large instance, but our users are very engaged. We don't want them to be drowned out by a massive influx of new accounts utterly shifting the vibe of the site overnight

        Well i hadn't considered that, but perhaps i should've considering the effect that one bot account has had.

    • Yeah, i think Lodions a great steady hand on the tiller. For me, i feel like AZ could become the basis for a wider 'fediverse first' set of social media alternatives for Australians. That would take more active growth and discussions and actions on direction in that vein. Lodion has a different vision to me on this projects development, and Lodions the lead on this experiment, and we've hashed that out before.

      There are definitely practical, time consuming administrative hurdles that Lodion and Nath have highlighted that a user and cheerleader like me rarely notices, i think this is a key driver behind the non-listing. The only thing i can say to that is there seems a fairly technologically knowledgable and engaged set of people on AZ that might be willing to muck in to support the project in material administrative ways. There are some particular users that i'm surprised aren't admins from the beginning tbh, but thats my 'on the outside looking in' assessment of a situation i don't really know about.

      • yeah I was looking to setup a piefed instance just to keep touch on how much admin is involved but I can barely commit myself to mod, let alone run a server in my spare time

  • Could be this too

35 comments