It can be tough to get yourself out of a "human labor" mindset, thinking that some significant resources would need to be poured into all the botting and thus it would have to be worthwhile, and profitable by the standards you are used to.

But once the bot system is already set up, a minimal amount of effort is required to re-target the bots onto anything at all that looks like it has potential. A few button pushes, and they set the things loose, like you turn on a washing machine, then they walk away.

A lot of the heavy traffic is coming from places where a single USD goes a long way, so not only is the botting effortless, the profit motive functions differently. Somebody pulling in $15 a day, converted to oh, rupees, or ruble, or especially won (North Korea) will consider that a much bigger, more motivating score than you might.

So this Lemmy thing is taking off, and there are dollars to be scraped, why not turn the bots upon it, set them loose to do all the work, tirelessly and at scale, for essentially nothing save a bit of electricity? Maybe they supervise the situation on a daily basis. If botting kills the platform that's not their problem.

This logic means that botting up even small communities makes sense.