There has been a big spike in growth over the last 2 days, and some rather suspicious new instances appeared out of nowhere with thousands of new users, even though there is close to no activity in any of them.
Could all those be bots? Would it be smart to block those instances preemptively?
I don't think it's weird or necessarily a problem that instances like lemmy.ml or lemmy.world would be rapidly gaining users recently. cubing.social is pretty weird though. There's nothing wrong with wanting an account there, but what would motivate 24.4k users to sign up in 12 days with hardly any content being posted locally? Are there private communities or something?
I'm worried about the panic though. If everybody starts defederating because they don't like the metrics of other instances then either federation will fail overall or it will become like e-mail where you can't really run your own e-mail server anymore because major mail providers basically federate on an allow list instead of a block list.