That wouldn’t explain where the 6112 users suddenly came from.

I noticed this as well. Within just a few hours a whole bunch of newer instances have suddenly shot up by several thousand users each. My guess is that people are using bots to take advantage of the sign-up bugs and are creating thousands of bot account to use in various annoying and nefarious ways in the near future.

Maybe. Instances full of lurkers … it makes sense.

You can see the communities that users of that instance have subscribed to from the instance’s main page: communities -> All.

In the case of parapheum, there’s a few but not that many … I’d expect more given a user base of ~7k.

If you go to fedidb (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy ) they list the MAU (monthly active users) for each instance. Instances like parapheum only have like 1 or a few MAU. As I understand, to be an “active” user, one must post at least once. I presume this includes comments as well as full posts. If so, there should really be more than 1 MAU for ~7k users. So it’s hard to tell.

I’ve checked the admins of a couple of these instances, and they seem to be real and have had interactions … so maybe we should ask some of them what’s up.