So, lemmy seems to be flooded with spam bot accounts at the moment. Look through the table of servers on fedidb (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy) and notice how there are these huge instances without any active users (MAU).
Also notice how startrek.website has 9000 users for 276 active users this month.
From memory, when I signed up, there was no email requirement or captcha or anything.
Admins … maybe you want to tighten things up?
Yep. Been seeing this on mine and a few other instances. They are random word + numbers. They are using bogus emails which cause bounces. One instance that was hit got their mail service locked out because of bounced emails.
I enabled captcha and manually deleted the users that had signed up… Its very hard to list users in local instances.