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Trackers like Lemmyverse.net and Fediverse Explorer are incentivizing instance owners to inflate numbers with bots
(lemmy.world)
The vast majority of the instances in that screenshot have known jumps from 1~50 users to tens of thousands in less than a day. These instances also happen to not require a captcha on sign up.
It may very well be that instance owners are innocent as some have really been victims of bot attacks and simply forgot that you could enable captchas for sign-ups, nevertheless I think instance directories like Lemmyverse.net should start disincentivizing anyone from inflating his own instance with tens of thousands of bots in order to get on top of those "leaderboards".
How would it benefit an instance to be on the top of the leaderboard. Having more people on your instance means higher server costs. The optimal situation is to have a small group of people on each instance but just more instances.