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
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