The vast majority of the instances in that screenshot have known jumps from 1~50 users to tens of thousands in less than a day. These instances also happen to not require a captcha on sign up.

It may very well be that instance owners are innocent as some have really been victims of bot attacks and simply forgot that you could enable captchas for sign-ups, nevertheless I think instance directories like Lemmyverse.net should start disincentivizing anyone from inflating his own instance with tens of thousands of bots in order to get on top of those "leaderboards".

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[–] AlmightySnoo 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (8 children)

Crypto scams, viagra or literally anything they want to advertise. Same reason blog comments spamming is a thing.

[–] haxasaur 7 points 2 years ago (7 children)

And 99% of those people are just gonna click that X and stop going to the site that redirects them. If it's not a Lemmy instance they are getting to, then what would make them stick around?

The blame should be more on the sites like lemmyverse.net for not vetting the links they are advertising.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

How would you expect moderation to be applied to lemmyverse, then? Remove all communities with >5000 members?

[–] haxasaur 1 points 2 years ago

I was imagining just checking the homepage.

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