Here you can see 2 day old post warning about the danger of not using email/captcha verification:
https://lemmy.ml/post/1345031
And here are stats of lemmy platform where it shows that we gained 200 000 lemmy users in 2 days:
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
Another tracking site with the same explosion in users: https://the-federation.info/platform/73
What do you think? Is it some sort of a bug or do people run bot farms?
Edit2: It's been now 3 days and we went from 150 000 user accounts 3 days ago to 700 000 user accounts today making it 550 000+ bot accounts and counting. Almost 80% accounts on lemmy are now bots and it may end up being an very serious issue for lemmy platform once they become active.
Edit3: It's now 4th day of the attack and the amount of accounts on lemmy has almost reached 1 200 000. Almost 90% of total userbase are now bots.
Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
Where are you getting that 90% figure? I'm seeing stratospherically higher activity than I was a week ago, I'm willing to buy half to 2/3 of those accounts being a combination of alt accounts, duplicate accounts (e.g., people moving off beehaw) and bot accounts, but 90% bots sounds implausible.
Nobody is making 1.6 million bots to target 100,000 users.
What about bots to talk to the bots thought?
The platform has no measures against farming bots that's why the number of bots is this stupid high, it's very easy to do at the moment.
You were asked to source the number you're using.
But everyone's evidence that it's happening a lot is that there are lots of new users, and that it'd be easy to make it happen.
That's conjecture, not evidence.