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”.
I own lemmyverse.net and I disagree. More users = more load. Users can pick an instance they are happy with.
Actually your “smart sort” looks like it successfully ignores spammy looking instances, but a sort by # of users (which is a natural reflex since people coming from Reddits would feel comfortable with a large instance, we’re talking about people completely new to the Fediverse idea) gives this unknown “Coffee” instance as the 4th largest instance and its owner still hasn’t enabled captchas.
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