Please. Captcha by default. Email domain filters. Auto-block federation from servers that don't respect. By default. Urgent.
And yes, to refute some comments, this publication is being upvoted by bots. A single computer was needed, not "thousands of dollars" spent.
We already have existing anti-bot measures in the world that don't involve writing a lame sentence. Also, it's very easy to spoof an introductory sentence. You could train a fairly small language model to do so.
I run my own private instance. I’ve had 5 requests to join in the past 24 hours. 2 of them seemed legit, but the other 3 had suspiciously similar sentences. They all had somewhat incorrect wording. All mentioned “the current situation at Reddit” and also all used another word that I’m forgetting right this moment.
I denied even the ones that seemed real because I’m not trying to host a bunch of randos and have to worry about moderation and stuff for them.