Fediverse

That's certainly another theory why these bot accounts don't actually seem to do anything (so far). But it doesn't fit to the picture that lots of naive instance admins seem to ask for help against this.

I am starting to think that it is either some test run or a greyhat that wants to force instance admins to improve registration security before actual bad actors exploit them.

Damn, that certainly a spam attack. Maybe these bots were created to make the picture of "populated" fediverse for all people that escape Reddit. But in anyway they shouldn't exist

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.

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. T

I think that's taking it too far and jumping to conclusions. I cannot think of a single instance of an instance admin inflating their numbers with bot accounts or in any other artificial way, and I've been on fedi before it was called fedi.

This is almost certainly external bad actors taking advantage of captcha-less open signups.