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.
I think the other user nailed it. It’s easy to look at the list of lemmy servers and defederate the bot farms by comparing “active users” to “total users”. I guess once the bots are active that will look a bit different.