cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/358415
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”.
Okay sorry, I misunderstood the post then. I thought you were blaming the instances that were inflating their numbers.
Yeah no, I wasn’t pointing fingers at anyone. I was just pointing out that the very existence of websites like lemmyverse.net which feature large instances are implicitly encouraging instance owners, in this case particularly bad actors, to inflate their numbers. It also hurts the Fediverse as a whole as new visitors will see a bunch of spammy looking instances featured on those websites.