Several admins made it known that instances without captcha verification were getting bombarded with account verifications (lemmy.world got shut off from their email verification for a bit, even), and enabling captcha solved the issue. That only really happens with bots.
You can also see fairly dead instances getting 10s of thousands of users without any corresponding activity. That’s a pretty big sign there.
How do we know when things are bots?
Several admins made it known that instances without captcha verification were getting bombarded with account verifications (lemmy.world got shut off from their email verification for a bit, even), and enabling captcha solved the issue. That only really happens with bots.
You can also see fairly dead instances getting 10s of thousands of users without any corresponding activity. That’s a pretty big sign there.