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
Seems like a pretty important detail. Why wasn’t it mentioned it in the post body?
Because they’re not trying to make a big deal about how easily CSAM spread throughout federated instances making all hosts possibly legally liable. Instances in the US are probably ok, due to various laws like safe harbor for platform providers but with instances all over the world, they all have their own laws to contend with and many never expected this
It’s really not that hard to connect the dots… Unless you’re trying to impose a question for the sake of
It’s about transparency for me. The admins claim to care about it and users praise them for it, but to me it seems like they’re doing the bare minimum informing us about changes we are about to notice. Reminds me of corporations writing statements trying to sweep things under the carpet. You and I might realise what it’s all about, but many users without the context won’t.
That’s not what I want Lemmy to be. I want to feel included as a part of the community. I’m doing what I think I can to help it all go in the right direction
Doing “the bare minimum”? We have quite a big team trying to keep the impact for our users to a minimum. We don’t claim to care. We DO care. And we try to be as transparant as possible.
We monitor the new posts, we react very quickly to reports, we make sure that even with the sign up requirements everyone can still get on board quickly and we are looking for a solution for the csam problem.
If this is not what you want Lemmy to be, there are plenty of options.
I’m only talking about transparency here, didn’t mean to undermine other moderation efforts and sorry if I phrased it ambiguously. But regarding informing users, yes, I think Lemmy.world admins do the minimum
Understand the issue with transparency. It’s just a very sensitive topic all around. And it sucks it is happening. I am not realizing as well a very important threat that exists in unmoderated federation.