I think this is ultimately going to limit the success of Lemmy. With Reddit self-destructing right now and Lemmy being proposed as an alternative, there is a short window of time for Lemmy to become incredibly popular, but the sign up process has to be be as frictionless as possible. However, it's anything but that on instances like Beehaw:
- Having to write an application is a hoop that many people won't want to bother jumping through.
- Requiring users to wait for their new account to be approved is going to put many off. I suspect a lot just won't come back to check if their account has been approved.
- Being rejected (especially without realizing) is going to leave a sour taste in people's mouths and they'll just not bother.
- Requiring a human to manually read applications and approve every new sign-up is obviously self-limiting.
Sure, there are instances that don't require manual approval, but many people aren't going to spend much time hunting for one. Most people are just going to pick one of the most popular ones and give up as soon as they meet any kind of resistance.
Right but there's a huge chasm between "Enough users to make a service a viable alternative to Reddit" and "400+ million users".