There's definitely bot farming. Someone i know on Mastodon posted this yesterdar: Post in spanish
this is a translations made by google and I changed some words: "I set up an instance of Lemmy, to test a few things. I passed it on WhatsApp to a group of people, so they could look at it. I always had the federation turned off because it's a test instance and I don't want to screw anyone in other instances. I had the configuration that it sends me an email if someone asks to register. Eventually trying configurations, I ended up leaving it with open registers. Last night I got about twenty new account registrations, with names that seem to want to imitate subreddits (ragequit, yolo, hype, things like that; I don't know subreddits like that but it sounds like they might exist). And various things:
- This instance doesn't connect to anything, nobody (apart from a group of people who reacted with total apathy to the issue) had that domain. It was not published, it was not federating. Registrations came just the same. It occurs to me that since it is lemmy. there is a bot testing that scheme with different domains.
- Lemmy sent me an email letting me know that these people applied for registration, but I can't see the registration application anywhere, because there was no application, there was registration. And that email is turned off by default. With a Lemmy instance configured "out of the box" you wouldn't know.
- Maybe it's me, but from the UI (at least on the phone) I can't find a way to see the list of users. I know the names from the email that came to me. The only thing I found is the search engine, and there I can search one by one.
All of this seems to me like a nightmare to moderate. And the truth is that I do not blame the instances of Lemmy at all that are blocking the instances that have open registration."