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?