Plot twist: All of the "bot accounts" were actually a huge influx of Reddit users who were lurking. By removing the accounts / defederating with their instances, we've sent them all back to Reddit, ensuring Reddit can pull through the mass exodus.

[–] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Nah lol, I'm an admin and could see all the email addresses they were using. Fake af

[–] Dark_Blade@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

tbf disposable email services are a thing

[–] quickpen@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

But my email is a Fastmail masked email, it’s randomly generated l, so it might look fake as well ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[–] Steeve@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well that's what I get for making my email address chuqid71bdu6@hotmail.com

[–] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 1 points 1 year ago

Lmao yeah that pretty much looks like what they were using.

But the way I took care of it was just deleting users who hadn't completed their email verification within one hour. The bots haven't actually done email verification YET

[–] manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech 1 points 1 year ago

yeah, no

i was in the channels when these were occurring, the people doing it spent no time trying to make the activity look organic in any way.

there are new admins running instances but a lot of us have been doing this (it sysadmin) for a long time for bigger fish.