Yeah, I'm trying to track where these new accounts are being created, because they're not at top lemmy instances like lemmy.world or beehaw.org, which have validation measures at signup.

Yeah, I think monthly active users is a better metric because I've head about some automated mass sign ups that have been happening.

I wonder if there's a scope to auto delete accounts that are created by never return after x weeks. Or a measure of active daily unique users by IP address...

That instance's real url (at least in the DB) is lemmy.podycust.co.uk. parapheum.com is another one that has a similar situation, they have ~5k new accounts in the past days and very little activity on their instance other than the admins. I have sent messages to the admins of both instances making sure they are aware of the situation...

For fun here are the numbers of their users that show up on my instance (because they have participated somewhere my instance is federated with) compared to beehaw which has about 12.5k users:

lemmy=# select count(*) from person where instance_id = (select id from instance where domain = 'beehaw.org');
 count
-------
  3496
(1 row)

lemmy=# select count(*) from person where instance_id = (select id from instance where domain = 'lemmy.podycust.co.uk');
 count
-------
     6
(1 row)

lemmy=# select count(*) from person where instance_id = (select id from instance where domain = 'parapheum.com');
 count
-------
     3
(1 row)

Seems pretty concerning.

Makes it easy to defederate from them at least

What’s the point? Why do this?