Honestly, I sympathise with that. I miss them too. But I don’t think you can build a community by dumping a lot of zero-replies posts on it. It is providing some good reading but it can’t supply any engagement.

I may be noticing it more because I browse by new to keep my feed updated more often. So I get half a page of bot-posted threads in this community and it stands out more than it might otherwise.

Your point about the need for throwaways is a good one. I’m sure I did sign up to a Lemmy instance without having to give an email address but if I did, I can’t remember which one. And of course, that policy makes all of Lemmy vulnerable to bad actors. It would be good to have an instance that specialised in throwaways though.