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Edit 3.1: my numbers are outdated, there are currently 1 700 000 accounts which makes it even worse: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
When I first joined the Fediverse I saw a decent amount of people saying that they didn't want kbin/lemmy to have email verification. Is this what they wanted? Fake growth?
I was one of those people, I didn't understand the logic behing defederating instances with open registrations but now it turns out that those instances were right about doing that even though their reason sfor defederations were different.
There's no email verification? I sure had to verify through email.
There is but it isn't on by default, it depends on what setting your instance's admin sets
Depends on instance where you make an account.
It’s a new implementation. I had to verify as well.
Depends on the instance, some require it, some don't.