Just so you know, it was more than that. Just speaking from my own participation, you already saw the whereIsTamara alts debacle from February 11 involving fourteen accounts; here's another lemmy.org special from February 19 that wasn't about alts but trying to create a brigade by providing false info with an emotional plea to a fairly passionate group of people. Add what happened to your own comments the other day, and that's twenty-five proven bad accounts right there.

Add all the other dishonest/manipulative/bad actor bullshit I have no idea about, and I suspect even our own experience with lemmy.org is just a drop in the bucket.

I also expect that the value of lemmy.org will drop significantly to its admin now that it's been defederated from lemmy.world (the largest instance with the most comms and accounts) and that he will spin up a new instance without such obvious tells. One of the things whereIsTamara said to me before their accounts got modded (I have it screenshotted somewhere) was thanking me for telling them how to improve their game, like letting them know they needed to space out their posts, etc. In the bot attack that hit you, the bad actor did just that. Ergo, whatever's involved in this on the backend and whatever benefit it serves them to do this, it's worth enough to them to invest in it with time and effort and learning how to circumnavigate efforts to restrict their activities. They'll be back.

keep in mind piefed has a mechanism for people to check general subjects and it will subscribe to everything that is listed under it. I assume it still does that but not sure. so subscriber count is definately not a good indicator of popularity.