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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
I heard somewhere that the devs full on removed Captcha from the next release. I hope theres an alternative plan in mind, as I would hate so much to see Lemmy get overrun. It makes me think of the last time I checked USENET; it was almost entirely made up of low-effort cutty paste ads with bad grammar and links to malicious websites. The devs and admins have worked too hard for this system to see tgat happen here and I think all of us want to see it really thrive.
They already brought it back in that future release.
Oh good to hear!