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!
That sounds exactly like the badness in people’s hearts though.
The corporate types behind such actions aren’t people.
Such a Rick thing to say.
Dehumanization is how we got here.
Not a great way back? Unless you’re looking to go in circles.
Oh stop. That’s like that discussion about not dehumanizing neonazis.
And the answer here is the same: the corporate types don’t see us common folks as human. They see us as a product at best, and disposable resources at worst. It took a lot of effort to get to the point in which the rights of workers, the rights of consumers and the rights of people in other roles, to be recognized. Real sacrifice, even.
So we gotta do what it takes to keep those rights, because, again, those corporate types don’t see us as people. So, fuck them. They aren’t people either.
Humans are humans, whether you like them or not.
The bad thing about Nazis is they disagree. Feel free to be more like Nazis? I’d prefer to be different. Still human, but you know, acknowledging my fellow humans as such.
To ignore this fact is to lay claim to the idea that you could never end up in a situation where you’re treating people as subhumans. To call any human as subhuman is obviously antithetical to making that claim.
Clearly the only response to people who want to treat you as subhuman is to treat them with love and kindness so they can take advantage of the situation.
This is how every “civility” rule on the internet eventually becomes a “don’t sass the nazis” rule.
There’s a huge difference between treating someone subhuman, treating someone human, and treating someone love and kindness.
If you can’t see that, I worry for you.
If you want to be taken advantage of, good for you. Don’t volunteer me for it, thanks.
This is a very silly conspiracy theory. Big corps don’t give a shit about Lemmy, but there are plenty of script kiddies who want to hack easy targets. Contrary to your belief, there are plenty of dumb idiots with plenty of badness in their hearts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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With the American election next year and all the chaos on sXitter, no unlikely.