It is widely reported that lemmy has been the target of a massive bot sign-up wave where possibly more than a million fake accounts have been created on the federated alternative to reddit.
As of now the consensus seems to be [more below] that these bots are dormant, possibly having been put in place to wreak havoc at a later date.
A strength of the fediverse, of which lemmy is a part, is its spread out nature, over at least forty thousand servers (lemmy: one thousand), but this is also a weakness meaning that co-ordination of action against a bot-wave like this is a more complex task.
A further complication is the recent widespread availability of A.I. or LLM functionality where plausibly human content can be created in vast quantities by those who possess relatively cheap computer systems and the desire. Should the recent wave of fraudulent accounts be fed content from an 'AI farm' it could easily lead to lemmy being ridiculed as a notoriously unreliable platform.
As such it is imperative that across the lemmyverse a concerted effort is made to purge fraudulent accounts.
[from above] There is a possibility that such a fake AI posting undertaking has already been started; after all slipping vaguely relevant content into lemmy threads would be very difficult to spot in small quantities.
Is lemmy doing enough to protect itself from the bots?
It is clear Facebook have targeted a select handful of very influential people within the fediverse and it appears they have had some sucess in convincing some instances to federate with them or at least to make supportive comments. But when Mastodon has 20,000 instances and lemmy has 1,000 plus it is inevitable that a small number at least will agree to federate. The best thing to do is to be vocal about opposing Facebook and to threaten to leave your instance if they do federate. The fediverse can survive a hostile interloper but it will have to be pro-active. (Four years ago it rallied around a campaign to oust Gab. It suceeded completely).