Is this Total User Counter true? It seems kind of wrong because the Graph is only at 300k and i cannot imagine that we grew 200k people in the last 4 hours.
Click through to the top-growing new instance, lemmy.elest.io
It has 12k registered users, which is like 1/3 or lemmy.world. But it only has 4 users online, or 0.1% of what's online at lemmy.world right now. Parapheum has a similar massive imbalance in registered vs active users.
I haven't seen a satisfying description of what's going on here, but one thing that isn't going on is hundreds of thousands of users registering on ONLY these new instances and then not using Lemmy at all. These are synthetic accounts. Are they malicious? I dunno. They're weird at least. There's an admin listed on the frontpage of each instance, might be worth asking directly.
If you filter the modlog by banned accounts you can see hundreds or thousands of accounts getting banned from the same instances: https://lemmy.world/modlog
I also see another commenter posted a link with more context. So yeah, looks like spambots in force.
These generally appear to be empty instances, likely chosen because their admins aren't sophisticated or paying attention. Even if [email protected] is taken, you can still be [email protected]. I feel like the worst thing that could happen is the spiderman pointing meme with you and a bunch of bots.