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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
When reddit migration begun we saw a huge bump in users and it was steadly stabilising and less users were joing, then this huge bump happened. You can go browse lemmy instances and see how many instances are ghost instances with 0 posts and comments that have tens of thousands of users.
https://the-federation.info/platform/73 to see those instances open the link and sort instances by user amount.
Edit: Just noticed that this site is not up to date. There are actually around 1000 instances on lemmy now and the site shows a little over 300 instances.
I love how beehaw defederated lemmy.world because too many people signed up but a bot instance with almost 50k users is fine. Sorry if I come across as harsh but I just increasingly see that instance as a complete joke.
i pretty much consider beehaw a separate thing of its own at this point.