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!
Dehumanization is how we got here.
Not a great way back? Unless you’re looking to go in circles.
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.
Big corps are more sociopathic than you realise. There are so many underhanded games going on at that level it will make your head spin.
Big businesses indirectly and sometimes directly fund APT groups. They will buy things that give them anonymous access to competitor trade secrets, or fund attack campaigns against competitors. This sounds like the kind of attack campaign a competitor might launch as part of a one-two combo. This is the first part, the second part is to get editorials out there regarding how lemmy.world is full of CSAM.
Nah. The risk greatly outweighs the reward. Even if this hits the news, I doubt it’d affect numbers on here that much, especially since it’s not that big. It’s not even big enough to cause issues for “competitors” (and I use the term lightly). The fediverse is simply not really ready to compete with established actors. So the “benefit” is quite small. The risk if they’re caught includes executives getting jail time and likely irreversible harm to their brand.
No way would a company risk being caught being responsible for CP. That would cause a massive backlash in the US socially, and the legal troubles would be huge. And the stock market would also very painfully punish them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
