Lemmy.world is temporarily disabling open signups and moving to an application-required signup process, due to ongoing issues with malicious bot accounts.
We know this is a major step to take, but we believe that it’s the right one for both us and our community right now.
We’re working on a better long-term technical solution to these bots, but that will take time to create, test, and verify that it doesn’t cause any problems with federation and how our users use our site, and we’d rather make sure we get it right than have a site that’s broken.
We’re making this change on 28 Aug 2023, and don’t have a specific timeline for how long registrations will require an application, but we will post an update once our new anti-abuse measures are in place and working.
Take care, LW Team
I guess I’m out of the loop, perhaps because I mostly browse communities I subscribed to, but…
What happened? Lots of spammy bots signing up and spamming the site? I guess I didn’t notice where I was looking
Also, what does application based sign up mean?
Anyhow, Lemmy.World Lemmy (in general) are growing nicely, so what’s needed to defend them is cool.
Troll / spam accounts posted CSAM in [email protected]. That spread with federation and every admin ended up involuntarily hosting such content.
Application based sign up means that if a user wants to subscribe they have to fill out a form and a .world admin gets to review it and approve or reject their sign up. It’s a measure of controlling who gets in and limiting the amount of bots and possibly troll that join an instance.
To make it clear, the form is virtually the same as before with one additional question. It just asks you to state you read the note that is the same as the note in the post above. The application is virtually identical beyond that. But, the biggest difference, is like you said, an admin needs to approve it.