I have the application process enabled for people to join my instance, and I’ve gotten about 20 bots trying to join today when I had nobody trying to join for 5 days. I can tell because they are generic messages and I put a question in asking what 2+3 is and none of them have answered it at all, they just have a generic message.
Be careful out there, for all you small instance admins.
Yeah they’re kept in the database.
A sufficiently complex captcha might do it. I’ve seen something else that verifies you’re not a bot based on PoW calculation, although I don’t know how reliable that would be personally.
A split verification method might be a good way forwards for the privacy conscious instances.