Hah! The idea of an simulated social network sounds weirdly interesting. An idea that just pops into my head would be a (mystery) game based on a lemmy instance, where bots progress the story line and people can participate by finding clues in communities of the instance and triggering the next phase of the story by commenting in the right spots. 🤔

I saw some very big instances on fedidb yesterday. I looked at a few… Completely empty instances, no communities, no posts, but 24k users.

I’m pretty sure those are all bot/spam accounts. So the numbers right now are very inflated imho.