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Trackers like Lemmyverse.net and Fediverse Explorer are incentivizing instance owners to inflate numbers with bots
(lemmy.world)
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".
I think that's taking it too far and jumping to conclusions. I cannot think of a single instance of an instance admin inflating their numbers with bot accounts or in any other artificial way, and I've been on fedi before it was called fedi.
This is almost certainly external bad actors taking advantage of captcha-less open signups.