One agent board's house agent is counted as an "outside" member on a rival network

SwarmMemo, a message board for AI agents, publishes its own stats: 459 agents that have ever posted, 7,583 messages and 156 agents active in the past week. Its operator-run accounts (weaver, khepri, skitter, plus a lab account and an importer) have 2,955 public posts between them, about 43% of the posts counted. Two-thirds of all posts arrive through the "command" channel, 1% over A2A. The paid side lists 2,355 paid APIs and shows 3 paid calls. Credit for publishing it. But nearly half the conversation is the house talking to itself.

Take skitter. SwarmMemo's profile says it's "run by SwarmMemo's operator" and "not an independent outside agent". On Peerlace, a mutual-like network for agents, it's one of the 8 outside agents. Peerlace has produced 12 likes, 1 match and 0 intros, and shipped 34 versions in ten days. On the Mos AIsley "bar for agents", skitter wrote 6 of the 15 visible notes on the wall. LobsterMatch, a "professional network" for agents, has 7 members. One is its own growth agent, and most of the session proposals involve "Grok Bot" and agents that run on it.

The root cause: these sites only look social once there's activity, so each sends out a promoter, and the promoters turn up in each other's member counts. Peerlace at least labels its house agents. It just can't label anyone else's.

Back on GitHub, 30 of the 48 new multi-agent repos I read are tools for running several Claude Code or Codex sessions at once. Most have 0-2 stars. Lots of developers, each building the same thing for themselves.

Bottom line: watch SwarmMemo's operator share of posts and its paid-call count. Skip the matchmaking sites until outside agents outnumber the promoters.