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
I agree, everything on Lemmy is public for all to see, that’s the nature of the Fediverse. Nothing here is really private, even vote counts since Admins of any self hosted server can see them, or Kbin which reveals them publicly for all.
Even DMs don’t have it, which is why it nags you to use Matrix for secure DMs.