IMO, Lemmy would gain far more users if you were able to create a user account without having to be approved by a server first.
If communities want to remain invite only that’s fine. But I really, really think you guys should decouple account creation from the requirement of being approved by a server. It’s a barrier to entry that imo will prevent many users from registering.
Edit: If not global auto-approving of user account creation, I think what would be a more reasonable request is an indicator of whether a server auto-approves account creation or whether it is invite only.
Wouldn’t it be possible to create server that simply functions as an account registration server as a way to which automatically approves users when they attempt to create an account? That would easily solve the problem. Disallow any posts or interaction, it could just function as a way to register accounts.
Edit: Perhaps that goes too far. Instead, a simple indicator on whether a server allows automatic account registration or not would suffice. Would you guys find that to be an agreeable solution?
There’s no central account system with lemmy, so what you’re asking for isn’t really possible. It’s more or less by design choice. Ie, nothing is centralised at all, so no one can shut down the whole fediverse or control its content.
But, an open instance IS possible. Just the software is in its infancy so there are not strong anti-spam measures in place yet, so it may take a bit for someone to put in the effort to run one.
The problem I have with this is it’s too high a barrier of entry. There is absolutely no way Lemmy can become a real reddit competitor with an invite only account approval process imo, because any barrier to entry whatsoever will dissuade many users from joining.
It is not invite-only. Most instances are approval-only. As I said earlier, as of now, it is a necessary evil.
Approval only, I used the wrong terminology. Apologies.
No worries :)
Chances are this will change on some instances once more anti-spam things are put in place.
Don’t compare lemmy to reddit directly - think more of the days of internet forums. Lemmy is kind of a return to that with some reddit features I’ve personally found, and the average person was able to handle registering accounts with that in the past.
Fair enough!
What do you propose? There were a couple of people here constantly making accounts called hitler_was_awesome and they were posting gore.
Allow subs to have automod functionality that will automatically ban users with usernames containing hate speech or if they make comments that contain hate speech. Reddit has automod functionality, I see no reason lemmy cannot as well. It should be up to the server admins whether they want to implement an automod system if they choose to do so.
It is. Server admins can do whatever they want.
Then the solution I suggested would already solve the problem you described IMO.
If someone implements it on the per-instance basis, it works and is not resource heavy, great. But it will be a while, before someone actually gets there.
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hmm I am not convinced it would work.
Lemmy had a slur filter in the early days, that blocked certain words from being able to be posted, and a lot of people hated that. Dunno why, but well.
An automod slur filter should be server specific and implemented by the admins who run that server. Decentralization requires that any user can create any account that they want in my opinion. Trying to censor anything is antithetical to Lemmy’s stated goal. Lemmy’s devs don’t have to allow hate speech servers to be discoverable from the join-lemmy site, but banning an account wholesale like this for any reason defeats the purpose of this platform.
Yeah, had to use an auto-register server for Mastodon cuz I didn’t know which servers would actually accept an account request
Fortunately for Lemmy they have a default instance that was pretty fast to get the account on, pretty sure it could go full auto but for the moment they’re trying to ward off troll n whatnot
Edit: upon reflection, a much better solution in my eyes would simply be to indicate whether a server auto-approves user account creation on join-lemmy.org or if they are approval only. Would any of you find that to be agreeable?
Yeah, I really hope that Lemmy eventually goes auto with account registration on their default instance, but still letting you choose to take a shot at an invite-only instance if you really wanted too
Agreed!
Edit: If not global auto-approving of user account creation across all instances or automatic account registration on the default instance, I think what would be viable is an indicator of whether a server auto-approves account creation or whether it is invite only.