I have the application process enabled for people to join my instance, and I’ve gotten about 20 bots trying to join today when I had nobody trying to join for 5 days. I can tell because they are generic messages and I put a question in asking what 2+3 is and none of them have answered it at all, they just have a generic message.
Be careful out there, for all you small instance admins.
This reminds me of when I had bots joining a Groupme I made, so I locked it down and made it so that people had to answer a question to get in, something like “say beans if you’re not a bot”. Caught so many bots that way. It’s good that you set up a question like that for your instance.