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
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.
Nah. The risk greatly outweighs the reward.
Does it? Standard dark web precautions are more than enough to throw any investigation into a dead end, especially for a one-off transaction with the buyer having little to no other activity.
The fediverse is simply not really ready to compete with established actors.
Yet. The Fediverse isn’t ready to compete yet. Business people aren’t looking purely at the present, they’ve got a keen eye on the foreseeable future too. If there is a growing momentum towards the fediverse, that can spell trouble for Reddit in 5 years time. The entire point of such an attack is to derail momentum on the platforms. By the time they are ready to compete, it’s much too late for this kind of attack to have any reasonable effect.
