A lot of instances have been targeted by bots in the past few days unfortunately. Several small instances are suddenly up to thousands of users.
We have been spared so far - maybe thanks to the captcha requirement on sign-up - but that's no guarantee that we won't be hit soon as well. I'm constantly monitoring it & prepared to start putting mitigations in place when I notice incoming bots.
Would the email validation requirement make it even less likely that we get issues in case somehow they manage to automate their way out of the captchas? Also, thanks a lot for your work here :)
And I also hope that most users there are real. We're seeing many apps and improvements in the default website as well for lemmy. Communities are growing, discussions are improving, the pace of these improvements is also very impressive.
Would the email validation requirement make it even less likely that we get issues in case somehow they manage to automate their way out of the captchas?
It certainly makes it more difficult to automate sign-ups, but it can be worked around (same as the captcha)