Pixelfed will allow easily blocking instances with open registration

poVoq@slrpnk.net to Lemmy@lemmy.ml – 31 points –
mastodon.social

I think this is something Lemmy should also consider. Open registration is an invitation to abuse an instance as a spam vector.

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You think every instance should require an admin individually approve every account?

This will not help adoption at all.

Manual approval isn't the only alternative to Open Registration - the main one involves requiring an email address, and/or solving a captcha

Oh, I assumed those were still considered "open".

In Lemmy terms they're at 'RequireApplication'. Open is completely open. PixelFed have automated something that lemmy.world did for feddit.nl a while ago - defederate from them until they changed their application policy.

Those are largely useless against spammers, but indeed there could be other options like giving already registered users usage limited invite links etc.

First of all this is mainly a feature to protect existing instances against spam from other badly managed instances.

But yes, admin approval scales surprisingly well if you have several admins per instance and many smallish instances, and it could be further improved by giving existing users secret invite links than don't require admin approval (AFAIK also already supported by Pixelfed).

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It's not a one-click solution, but lemmy admins can check other instance's registration policy. e.g.
curl https://lemmy.world/api/v3/site | jq -r .site_view.local_site.registration_mode

Other Fediverse apps will reveal it in different ways of course. Nothing to stop an instance that was set up just for spam from lying about it of course.

Nothing to stop an instance that was set up just for spam from lying about it of course.

Yep it’s trivial to get a reverse proxy to modify the response to make it look like they don’t have open registration.

We have the ability to block instances but that won't work on commenters from instances that are known to be problematic. There are some instances I just want to flat out DNI on due to them being consistently unpleasant and adding nothing to the conversation, right now my only option is to manually block their users and get myself banned from the problem instance so I stop showing up for them. Not ideal.

I assume you're talking about lemmy?

Because on microblogging-fedi/masto you can block/mute complete instances, so you don't see anything from there

They recently implemented instance blocking into Voyager