Best ideas I got are random captchas, make lemmy invite only, and/or set up some sort of verification system.
Maybe the captcha failure rates visible on a user profile. These tactics can scare off new users but letting lemmy get taken over could be worse than doing nothing.
I watched twitter slowly get flooded with bots. I don’t want the same to happen here.
The bots that flood the site every link they see with no quality control are annoying as shit. And if you block them then you won’t see the minority of decent links that are in there.