The 0.18 version of Lemmy was announced. This will solve many issues.
But we can’t upgrade yet because the captcha was removed, and captcha relied on Websockets, which are removed in 0.18 so despite the devs agreeing on my request to add captcha back, this will not be until 0.18.1. Without captcha we will be overrun by bots.
Hopefully this 0.18.1 will be released soon, because another issue is that the newest version of the Jerboa app won’t work with servers older than 0.18. So if you’re on Lemmy.world, please (temporarily) use another app or the web version.
Anything stopping new members from signing up is going to hurt the adoption of the platform as a whole.
There are still many other instances that accept signups, so I don’t think temporally disabling lemmy.world signup will hurt lemmy.
However, having a popular client incompatible with a popular instance will annoy existing and new users.
This is a classic damned if you do damned if you don’t. Right now engagement of the users that are already here and adoption of new users is of equal importance.