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

      • GONADS125@lemmy.world
        27·
        1 year ago

        I hope you guys are doing okay having to see all that shit… No shame in reaching out to mental health professionals. Makes me sad imagining you guys picking up emotional baggage and trauma having to see all that to protect the community.

        I appreciate you guys looking out for us, but I hope you all have proper support yourselves.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
    1562·
    1 year ago

    Whew, I’m glad I got in before this or my fellow homo sapiens might not have noticed I was also a fellow homo sapiens like them and definitely not a robot.

  • kadu@lemmy.world
    1222·
    1 year ago

    No place is safe from this, unfortunately. I moderated 2 big brazilian subreddits, and then decided to volunteer to help a smaller one. I had a day (and to be honest, an entire week) absolutely ruined when somebody did indeed set a bot to post large amounts of CSAM to the subreddit. Luckily I was online to quickly purge it all, and Reddit’s admins did remove the accounts pretty much instantly, but I feel for every Lemmy admin that even caught a glimpse of this material and now have to purge their computers and honestly, their minds, from that. Sorry to hear it happened.

        • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          201·
          1 year ago

          Yeah, the term CP (Child Porn) has always been a terrible name for it. It sounds weird, but “Child Porn” sounds much less dramatic than it is, like some sort of fringe porn. Meanwhile CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) make it a lot more clear that there is a child being abused.

        • eric@lemmy.world
          152·
          1 year ago

          Same, and to make sure no one else has to have it in their search history, CSAM stands for “Child Sexual Abuse Material.”

    • Ab_intra@lemmy.world
      111·
      1 year ago

      I saw one of these videos in my feed last night and it was very obvious to me what it was. Thankfully it wasn’t anything that was to bad, but It still gives me the creep that something like that was in my feed.

  • input@lemmy.world
    1072·
    1 year ago

    Hope it restricts the attack surface, why do people have to be such knobs

    • pretzelz@lemmy.world
      10716·
      1 year ago

      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!

          • foggy@lemmy.world
            1113·
            1 year ago

            Dehumanization is how we got here.

            Not a great way back? Unless you’re looking to go in circles.

            • El Barto@lemmy.world
              156·
              1 year ago

              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.

              • foggy@lemmy.world
                39·
                1 year ago

                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.

                • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  71·
                  1 year ago

                  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.

      • Aux@lemmy.world
        4410·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
        343·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
        16·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • PsychedSy@sh.itjust.works
        61·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • T156@lemmy.worldEnglish
        62·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • BitOneZero @ .world@lemmy.world
        31·
        1 year ago

        Nothing like a little bit of corporate sabotage!

        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.

      • ekZepp@lemmy.worldEnglish
        54·
        1 year ago

        With the American election next year and all the chaos on sXitter, no unlikely.

  • Astrealix@lemmy.world
    691·
    1 year ago

    Looks like even this place couldn’t keep it up. Unfortunate. Thanks admins for the transparency though.

  • DelvianSeek@lemmy.worldEnglish
    62·
    1 year ago

    Good call. Thank you for doing what you need to do to support the site and protect the users as necessary. And as always, the honesty and transparency is appreciated.

  • no banana@lemmy.world
    53·
    1 year ago

    I think it’s the right call honestly. We’ve grown so quick that it must be hard to manage by now.

  • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    38·
    1 year ago

    If you could give me the numbers of new accounts monthly I would look into CloudFlare. If I can afford it I will even pay for it.

  • pm_boobs_send_nudes@lemmy.world
    373·
    1 year ago

    I don’t blame you for taking that decision. But it’s sad that this will deter legitimate users away, some of whom would’ve signed up otherwise.

  • ConstipatedWatson@lemmy.world
    29·
    1 year ago

    I guess I’m out of the loop, perhaps because I mostly browse communities I subscribed to, but…

    What happened? Lots of spammy bots signing up and spamming the site? I guess I didn’t notice where I was looking

    Also, what does application based sign up mean?

    Anyhow, Lemmy.World and Lemmy (in general) are growing nicely, so what’s needed to defend them is cool.

    Edit: fixed grammar