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

  • Margot Robbie@lemm.ee
    46·
    1 year ago

    I’m actually advocating for something in between: having a open registration weekend on a set time every month, and registration applications the rest of the time.

    It solves both problem of having too many applications to deal with, and makes it a lot harder to create spam accounts since the time surface is reduced significantly.

      • Margot Robbie@lemm.ee
        2·
        1 year ago

        It’s easier to monitor for suspicious bit signup activities when you funnel them into a small time window with full attention during that time frame, instead of having to watch for them 24/7.