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.
Question then, would a viable solution to what I’m suggesting be simply adding an indicator of whether servers auto-approve user account creation or not on the join-lemmy.org site?
Yep! That would be the place for them.
I’m not aware of any open instances that exist at the moment though. Eventually once some automatic moderation tools start developing they’ll probably start (slowly) popping up.
Yeah as long as there is an indicator of whether a server is an open instance or not would immediately solve the issue I’m describing, for myself at least.
I opened a github issue for this here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2899