So, lemmy seems to be flooded with spam bot accounts at the moment. Look through the table of servers on fedidb (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy) and notice how there are these huge instances without any active users (MAU).
Also notice how startrek.website has 9000 users for 276 active users this month.
From memory, when I signed up, there was no email requirement or captcha or anything.
Admins … maybe you want to tighten things up?
You have a point, especially as lemmy defines “active” as a user that has at least posted once within the relevant time period. So yes, lurkers definitely wouldn’t count toward the active user count (mastodon and the like use different metrics AFAIU).