Also, I’d expect most people to accept the idea applications once you tell the purpose (to fight bots).

I’m not going to tell them that because it’s not really true, we currently have automated solutions for bot detection and banning that are way more user-friendly as they eliminate that process of being slowly, manually deemed worthy. They’re just unfortunately slightly more effort to set up. I’ll just recommend people join the few servers that use them and allow open sign-ups without having to justify why you want to join lemmy.