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
Does this mean Beehaw will refederate?
Considering this is a temporary measure, I imagine not. Lemmy.world has been under constant attacks as the #1 Lemmy instance and it’s not going to stop just because bots can’t get in automatically anymore.
It’s a good question. Hopefully the Beehaw admin team will reach out to the Lemmy.World admin team to have a discussion about exactly what the LW admins are trying to achieve and under what conditions they will be ready to reopen submissions. Though even if they do have that conversation there’s no guarantee that that will match up with what the Beehaw admins are looking for in order to refederate. It was made clear from the Beehaw admins at the time though that they didn’t have any issues with LW in general, only that toxic disruptive people were using the open sign-up of LW to create accounts to go cause trouble over at Beehaw (outside of the general LW userbase) and that they hoped to refederate once better tools were in place to address those disruptive users. Could be that lines up pretty well with LW’s goal to wait until they have better tools to address malicious bot accounts before they reopen signups.
Considering the people that run Beehaw and their very fast defederation, I can’t imagine that their statement of wanting to refederate is anything other than a mere pleasantry. I doubt they really want to.
And its fine, small communities are easier to manage. Its not like we are really missing out on much.