Several days ago, when I was making this account, I could register without email. Now if you check the sign up page you can see that they require an email.
I think it’s a shame because emails nowadays are hard/impossible to create privately (requiring phone number, etc) and annoying to manage (especially if you go rigorous about it, one email for every service you sign up for). The issue with this is that in many cases, you have to trust your email provider with the information that you signed up for a particular service and potentially even your username on the service. Moreover, that has potential to “link” your accounts on different sites.
No email required also allows people to create non-permanent throwaway accounts easier which are commonly used on reddit to ask sensitive questions or for other reasons.
Sorry if this posts seems too negative, I appreciate what the admins of the lemmy instance do, and I won’t leave lemmy.world just because of it. I am sure that admins had good reasons for this change. However, I still think that this could be important to bring up, because it’s about internet privacy, ease of sign up (especially for throwaway accounts), and possibly other reasons that I couldn’t mention right now.
I’m assuming the number of bot accounts would skyrocket if there isn’t any sort of email verification.
But I mostly agree, I think a good compromise would be to just have a captcha on the sign up page.
I would like to know more about possible positive sides of required email address (like how much does it change stuff, etc), and see discussions of if people agree/disagree with having required email.