Lemmy is a federated system and these stats are self-reported by user maintained systems. Rather than a sudden influx of users (bots or otherwise), a misconfigured system or hiccup in stats collection seems more likely.

Generally, Hanlon's Razor, add applied to computing: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ~~stupidity~~ user error.

There's a lot of malicious systems out there, but there is little corroborating evidence indicating that we're under attack.

[–] hydroptic@sopuli.xyz 5 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

Hanlon's Razor is all well and good as a heuristic, but tends to lead to people discounting malice much too often. Also, I really didn't say we were "under attack"

[–] sbv@sh.itjust.works 2 points 18 hours ago

Hanlon's Razor is all well and good as a heuristic, but tends to lead to people discounting malice much too often.

There's definitely scenarios where that is the case.

Also, I really didn't say we were "under attack"

I would describe a massive influx of spambots as an attack on a social media platform. It's my characterization. I didn't mean to imply that you said it.

[–] user224@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Look at the bottom with server count. Likely something screwed up there, and when those instances were suddenly returned, the user count was added back before being subtracted when they disappeared from the data.

[–] sbv@sh.itjust.works 1 points 18 hours ago

Agreed.