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
Not wanting to be too conspiratorial, but it isn’t necessarily people simply doing this out of the badness of their hearts. The fediverse is a disruptive platform and there are many parties with deep pockets that might happily funnel a little bit of cash to certain consultancies in certain countries to stop things and add friction to this platform before it really takes off. Nothing like a little bit of corporate sabotage!
The alt right instance has been fucking with world since they were defederated…
This is something right up their alley, so the simplest solution is they’re doing it.
Come on people, Lemmy’s user base is what, a few hundred thousand? A million tops? Which “parties with deep pockets” is this disrupting? The Lemmy userbase is a rounding error on the number of users of other popular social medias.
“Don’t want to be too conspiratorial, but let me continue to drop a ridiculous conspiracy with no evidence”
And big corp wants to smother it before it’s bigger. It perfectly makes sense. It’s so much more difficult to kill a service/movement when it’s already widely adopted and popular. Identifying small, new players in the field and disrupting those takes very few resources for them, a rounding error, if you will.
The fediverse has the potential to be a threat to some big corps out there, and Lemmy is just one speck in a sea of a lot of specks. Together those specks are growing the fediverse, and the only way to disrupt it is to get rid of those specks.
You’re delusional if you think the Fediverse, a totally open protocol that “competitors” can (and plan to) join instead of having to “defeat”, poses a threat big enough to corporations with hundreds of millions or even billions of users to warrant the spamming of child porn.
Not from a big corporation, no. It’s probably 4chan types. They tend to get deeply offended when people don’t want nazis around.
IIRC there was a post a few weeks ago that had the total number of active accounts somewhere around 60,000. Yeah, we’re definitely not big enough to attract that kind of directed attack
I like conspiracy theories as much as the next person. But let’s be real for a moment … this is shitty people doing shitty things. In part because Lemmy is a vulnerable and maybe relatively easy target by being indie software with indie instance management and relatively young. They might have a general purpose, such as being alt-right and defederated. But at it’s core, I think it’s gotta be just the “pleasure” they get out of breaking someone else’s shit … these people exist, we know they exist.
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Eh. It’s a new platform with new instances and a lot of potential attack vectors. With new users it’s becoming a valid target for them.
The software developers who created Lemmy openly criticize systems of government and economics. These are nation-state battlegrounds too. The barrier to entrance is very low, as Lemmy doesn’t even do routine tracking of account creation, rate-limiting alone isn’t really defensive. 15 years ago sites like Reddit had major vote manipulation detection logic behind the scenes. This is pretty much unleashed playground for a lot of known tactics.
No, Lemmy is nowhere near big enough for that. If it was, it would be simply bought out by one of those companies, and then shut it down, like with XMPP. They have no rhyme or reason to skulk around in the shadows.
In its current state, it is still very much in its infancy. A company would see more threat in the competing social networks trying to copy their model, or people just leaving outright than Lemmy for the time being. Mastodon would be more of a threat by comparison.
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With the American election next year and all the chaos on sXitter, no unlikely.