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 saw a Heise article with a mention (and link) to the tchncs lemmy instance few days ago.
While that’s obviously a considerably more tech savvy crowd than average, I highly doubt people would just spin up private instances with large number of users, that part still seems suspicious.
But yes, heise had repeatedly mentioned tchncs instance in it’s Reddit-related articles as one of if the alternatives. So increases in signups are expected from that I think.