Oh definitely some. At the time we were still in the tail of the reddit surge, we were getting plenty of valid registrations and spam was only starting to take off (which was the reason for closing registrations).
But to my point, I think back to my first Lemmy experience and remember trying to work out which server I should join even though I already had a basic idea about the Fediverse from Mastodon. And I just chose the biggest in the end bpecause how do you choose? Even today I would be wary about joining any server that didn’t have lots of people.
And later I remember hearing about Beehaw then finding a registration application page and not creating an account.
These happened well before the reddit exodus, and I never really got into Lemmy until that happened and I joined Beehaw.