Unless anyone knows another reason for this impressive increase in comments? Seems to roughly coincide with Sync launching. If thats the case, just goes to show the importance of good third party apps.
Source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
EDIT: Looks like a confusingly labeled graph and I think this is total comments. I have no idea why that spike could exist though.
It's not only because of Sync alot of other FOSS apps were released or got an update around the same time.
The apps were released / updated at the beginning of August. The huge jump in total comments happened in the last two days of July.
While optimism for the new apps is good, what we're looking at here is almost certainly botspam from a rogue or unmonitored Lemmy instance(s).
How can you tell? I can imagine that sync would have actually done much of this
I am a very active commenter on reddit, and right now, sync for lemmy hust feels like reddit because it's pretty much the same. I couldn't really tell you, but it would make sense that many people now have a design they were accustomed to before.
But if this increase was mostly from sync, that would mean that an average sync user would have had to comment 100-200 comments every day since then, because it has just 10k downloads on google play, which probably is the major source for most of those, so you might be right
The comment flood happened before people even had access to Sync.
Note that the graph is of TOTAL number of comments, and not comments per day. Somewhere, about 4-5 million comments were generated over 24-48hrs, then stopped.
You sure? The graph says per day, and there are parts where it decreases. I would expect a total to always increase, unless there are comment purges going on.
It's confusing. It's "average per day" because the number fluctuates based on uptime for various instances.
There are also instances which have completely shut down. That, and comment purges, as you mention, can cause the number to go down. It's also somewhat possible that defederation between one site or another could cause it to fall off the stat sites' trackers.
But the main point stands. The comment count jumped up BEFORE SYNC EXISTED.
It is possible that a significant amount is spam or something else, but I do find myself using Lemmy much more now that Sync is available.