Some small instances are seeing sudden increases in numbers of registered users (4k to 5k new users) but not an equivalent growth in activity, my guess is someone is creating accounts on instances without captcha enabled for account registration. Most of the top 10 fastest growing instances shown here fit that criteria.
Lemmy has an option to mark an account as a bot under user settings, OP had a bot icon next to their username on all of their posts with a message that said the account was a bot. They have since disabled that setting for their account, so it no longer shows up, but you can see how someone could have jumped to the conclusion that the account was a bot (this icon won’t show up on all Lemmy UIs, it’s missing from the mobile website/Jerboa app, but it’s shown on desktop). Anyway, no need to use such incendiary language, you may not be angry but it can easily come off as that over text.
Isn’t beehaw just another Lemmy instance?
I guess that’s possible. The instances I mentioned look like this:
https://fedidb.org/network/instance/parapheum.com
2 posts, 1 comment overall.
It had 10 users two days ago and 4.6k today, not a single one of them seems to have posted or commented.