Hey I don't run any instance so I'm not sure what's the best way to alert all instance admins - but there seems to be a massive wave of signups over the last few days, most likely by bots. I think some of the bigger instances know this and have mitigated it (my instance enabled captcha and email verification), but as a result, smaller instances like startrek.website and waveform.social are getting hammered. They've gone from 2000-4000ish users to >10,000 overnight. If this isn't fixed, it will probably be a big problem when these bot accounts are activated. It would suck if you run a smaller instance and had to defederate yourself because of thousands of spam bots.

If you create a community, please try and populate it with content. I see a lot of new communities with 0-1 posts from the mod. That's not nearly enough to get people engaged - users are going to see that it's a ghost town and leave. If you have enough interest to create a community, you probably know *something* about the subject matter, so PLEASE add some posts (5-10 would be a good start). Maybe some questions to get people talking, even popular reposts from other sites. It sucks shouting into a void, but if you don't do it, everyone else will also be shouting into a void. Also please consider whether you *need* to create a community! When there are 100 million users of the site, there may be 1000 people who are interested in the same exact niche tabletop RPG as you, but there are <500,000 users here for now, so you'll be lucky to find 10. Consider creating a thread in a broader community (like boardgames) until you have enough people talking in the thread that it gets messy - *then* it's time to create a separate community. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.