this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
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How do they handle bots? Seems to me this statistic could be heavily inflated. Or do they account for that?
Here is their listing of users per instance, looks a bit sus to me ("Benutzer" means "Users"):
It's active users, not total users. I'm not sure on the exact metric, but users need to post, comment, vote or whatever to be counted for this statistic.
Bots on alien.top do that afaik. They impersonate real Reddit users after all.
I don't think I understand your point about them impersonating users? It seems to me like an account gets created for everyone using the portal. It then provides you a password and you can start using that account. I tried it just now and it seems like your account gets flagged as bot on creation automatically. So most people posting from that domain, might just not have unchecked that "I'm a bot"-tick and are actual former Reddit users.
Creating an account doesn't make a user active though, but for the question if a bot posting stuff counts as an active user or not, I honestly can't say.
Afaik the bot auto-creation is disabled now, but it used to mirror some Reddit subreddits by automatically creating bot accounts for every Reddit user posting in them, and using that to post the same content in a Lemmy community. That's how the instance got over a million users, pretty much all of them are bots that do whatever the Reddit user with the same name is doing in one of the mirrored subreddits.
What you are describing is another part of the plan: Allowing the original Reddit users to take over their mirror accounts on Lemmy. Apparently it just creates accounts for them if no bot exists yet.