The way I've heard of things in federated instances, if one instance becomes bot filled and toxic, then other instances will unfederate them. It makes it worthwhile for mods of that instance to run a healthy server.
There's a bot running on one instance now that identifies itself as such and is reposting content from reddit with links going to the original article. These sorts of bots I can accept.
The problem is that there is no "the staff" as such. The developers can add tools, but if people want bot instances, there will be bot instances. The instance administrators can just not federate with them (which makes the most sense to me) but that will be on an instance by instance basis.
The reason it is likely a lot of bot accounts is someone explained how to exploit a glitch that creates thousands of bot accounts within minutes. The day after they posted the exploit, suddenly Lemmy started growing rapidly. It’s just too coincidental to not be mostly bots