Admin approval with some text that needs a little bit of thought to fill out is surprisingly effective and definitely slows down spammers a lot.

Sure, it will not totally prevent it and they can move to another instance, but if all the nicer instances enable it, it becomes much easier to defederate the badly run ones that don’t.

Thanks for responding.

Of course these accounts gets banned quickly.

You only temporarily ban them from what I’ve seen in the modlog. You may not know this (I didn’t until recently), but a home-instance temp ban will override a remote instance perma ban (there’s a PR in the works to fix this , but it’s the way things are currently). And when someone has a username like https://lemmy.today/u/JewKiller64g, I really don’t think they’re going to suddenly change their ways in 30 days and come back after a temp ban a better person.

Getting a fake email address is really easy, so I don’t think it makes any difference whatsoever. On fastmail which im using, I can even create fake ones with a click on a button. It’s built into the service to have different emails for different sites.

It adds at least an extra step they’ll have to go through if they’re spinning up a new account to evade a ban. The one in question has admitted they’ll just keep spinning up new accounts because it’s easy. Adding a slight inconvenience won’t stop everyone, but it would at least help prevent becoming a base camp for trolls.

I think it’s frustrating for new users to have to wait for a random time period to get accepted, specially when it serves no purpose. I’m not going to be any wiser if I approve the registration now or 12 hours later.

That’s also 12 hours where your instance can spin up accounts with no one able to do anything about them and everyone else has to deal with that.

How do you know which accounts are spam accounts before they even started posting?

You don’t, but at least with some form of barrier they’re not free to go crazy with no oversight.

If the spammers and trolls manage to make you defederate from Lemmy.today, they will pick another instance.

You’re not wrong there, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. Right now, they’re targeting yours because there’s no barrier to entry whatsoever.

Sooner or later, small instances may even stop accepting new users for fear of being defederated from the larger network.

Not as long as the admin is responsive and takes measures to address the problems.

I would like to stop having these spam accounts and trolls on the instance. I could add email verification but it won’t make a difference and just make it more annoying for new users

Most instances require this, as do pretty much all mainstream platforms. I don’t think anyone is particularly annoyed by this.

I think it’s the right choice to agree to some measures being taken. Even if it has marginal effect, it sends a message that you are doing what you can.

Hi!

I can’t speak for all users of lemmy.today but as a user of lemmy.today I would prefer it if we took reasonable steps like email verification to be a good neighbor, especially if it prevents other instances from de-federating us. Just my 2 cents. :)

If you’d like help managing it I’m willing to donate time and effort.

As someone who went through the application system to join my instance, it is really not that bad. Just have your potential users write a few sentences on their lemmy history, why they want to join your instance and what content they are looking for.

This can be answered in a few minutes, but it is already enough to discourage almost all bad faith applicants. The few hours of wait period while you check their application for copy pasting are also contributing to deter them, simply because spam users often want to do some mischief right now, waiting until tomorrow doesn’t work well for those impulses.

If somebody can’t moderate their instance in any kind of way that’s impacting other parts of the federation, it makes sense to defederate until they fix their problems.

I don’t think anybody should have open signups. It’s literally just an invitation to mess with the rest of us who are federated with the instance.