• Actual instance admins are reporting a massive bot influx the last few days: https://lemm.ee/post/177673
• If you click through any of the stat pages people are linking, active user count grew like 20%-30% over the several days when registered user counts grew 400%. None of the previous two weeks look anything like that. Active users should grow FASTER than registered users, since probably still ~20% of registered accounts are old/abandoned from before the reddit emigration and new human accounts stay active at least for a while as people test.
• If you look at the list of top growing instances, you’ll see instances with like 20k registered users and 6 (actually six) logged in users reported on their frontpage. If you compare that to instances with real humans involved, expect may 5% or 10% of registered users to show up as logged in (that will probably drop a bit over time as the current burst of engagement wans)… 0.2% of users being active is not normal.

Basically there isn’t really a debate. Anyone who spends 5m looking, immediately concludes using that organic growth is like 5% or 10% per day (which is monstrously and unsustainably fast growth). The many people posting this one graph of 600k bots getting registered over 3 days just haven’t thought it through for more than 3 seconds.