Please. Captcha by default. Email domain filters. Auto-block federation from servers that don't respect. By default. Urgent.
And yes, to refute some comments, this publication is being upvoted by bots. A single computer was needed, not "thousands of dollars" spent.
As I said in my post-
There are very intelligent people who make lots of money creating “bots” and “spam”. NOBODY is going to stop all of it.
The only way to resolve this, is to work together, to identify problems, and take action.
If I decide I want to write spam bots for lemmy- there isn't much that is going to stop me. Even approvals, aren't hard to work around. Captchas are comically easy to get past. Registered emails? Not a problem either. I can make a single valid email, and then re-use it once on every single instance. Writing a script that waits for approvals, is quite easy.