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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
My conspiracy theory is that it's Spez creating the bots as revenge
That's my theory too. He's acting like a cornered animal and needs to drive traffic back to reddit. What better way to do that than to break the website power users have been migrating to and advertising on Reddit?
Then June 30 the straggling migrants still holding out til the end will come over to a broken website.
I think spez hopes that their broken spirit and desperation will help drive people back to reddit, but a bot influx this huge, he must be legitimately worried.
It could also be spez bootlickers, but I would be shocked if someone who had the same knowhow to build a bot army was simultaneously stupid enough to not see the bigger picture happening at corporate.