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.
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.
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!
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 :)
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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As I replied to another thread, that would be possible. You can try to create and issue for it.
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.
It was. Again, you could do with the slur filter whatever you wanted as an instance admin. And admins of other instances can defederate with your instance for your decision, too.
Accounts can’t be banned wholesale. They can only be banned by the admins of a server.
I was just talking from experience. I believe that the spammer could easily create a new account and then just spam offending images, whatever.