this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2023
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I don't know that it is meant to be a drop-in reddit replacement. That's an assumption that goes too far IMO. I think it's certainly intended to have a lot of similar functionality as reddit, but the nature of it being decentralized tells me right off the bat that it's not a drop-in reddit replacement. That being said I do think there is a balance in striving to make it easy for people to onboard, especially reddit users looking for something else, but I also understand that keeping out bots and spam is critical.
It's easy to say it should be changed because we don't know what would happen if they changed it, but if the site did become overloaded in spam, that would be even more of a detriment than slowing the growth because people have to wait for approval. At least while others are waiting for approval, the people already here can use and enjoy the platform. If you get rid of that and it becomes loaded with spam, then no one gets to enjoy the platform.
But if the protocol for Lemmy is already decentralized, it would still be entirely up to the admins of the server to allow instant account approval or not, would it not? Lemmy.ml is not the entire lemmy protocol, Lemmy.ml gets to decide the rules here, and banning hate speech accounts from approval is a totally legitimate decision on their part because they don't want that kind of spam here.
That's what mods are for on reddit, so I'm currently failing to see the problem. Moderators exist on Lemmy servers right? That's how reddit solves the problem, why can't that work the same way on Lemmy?
The admins of the server have every right to ban users they don't want on their server or to make their server invite only, I am absolutely not contesting that. Their space, their rules. A violation of the servers rules should absolutely result in a ban.
I think the difficulty with a place that has such a low userbase that then grows rapidly is not having a lot of established active moderators. There's a lag time to some extent to getting active and responsible moderators. Plus not being a moderator nor an admin on Lemmy, I don't know the capabilities they have at hand, but I know with reddit the moderator tools were built up over time. All of the automodding capabilities they have now didn't exist at the beginning, and the automod tools are what allow them to handle such high numbers of users. I suspect Lemmy probably doesn't have extensive automated moderating tools at their disposal at the moment if I consider other deficits that Lemmy has at the moment.
How do you feel about a simple tag/indicator on the join-lemmy.org site that indicates whether a server has open registration or is invite only?
You are completely right. Disabling the approval feature equals unmoderatable instance (when the bots come), because a human (a moderator) simply cannot compete with a Python script posting spam every few milliseconds. Such instances are therefore instantly defederated by others in order to protect themselves.
Would automod functionality and keyword ban list for usernames serve to alleviate those concerns you have? If not, is there any solution you would propose that you think may work to solve that issue?
Sure, they would. But for that, you would need to implement them first, and implement them right, which is a highly challenging endeavour. I could imagine that this is on a backlog for Lemmy development, but it will take a while before any usable implementation is applicable.
Cool, then we're in agreement! I've opened a github issue per your suggestion here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2899