Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

@welshpixie @FediThing 🤦‍♂️

Mastodon moment, I suppose.

@welshpixie @FediThing Yeah, that seems like a close-to-ideal solution to me - just making it something like "Don't worry too much about what you enter here, we just want to make sure you're not an automated signup", I expect that'll address most of the issue

@antiaall3s Yep, widespread issue at the moment, originating from instances with open sign-ups (again). Lots of instance moderators are trying to deal with it at the moment, probably the chaos.social folks too.

@FediThing I think that would mostly resolve the problem for users, though I suspect that this would be difficult for instance moderators to deal with, due to the lack of data on which to make a decision; at least in my personal experience even a short message helps a lot in determining legitimacy.

It could still work as a way to *delay* spammers, but I'd be hesitant to recommend it as The Solution(tm), so to say.

@FediThing It can be, depending on the circumstances. I'm especially thinking of folks with social anxiety, RSD, etc. here, for whom it can already be very difficult to take the step of joining any kind of social community.

@FediThing I guess it mostly boils down to "people have become accustomed to a lack of stable social environment and so you need to make a point of subverting that expectation"

@FediThing It does create more friction in signing up, especially for people who have no existing connections in or familiarity with the fedi culture, because it's often not clear what to expect from an approval process (do you need to have a good reason? is it just a spot check? etc.) and it can feel like a job application or something fragile, as if you could get thrown out at any moment.

I don't think these are necessarily good reasons to not have an approval process, and I think a lot of improvements are possible there to mitigate these issues (including eg. invite systems), but this does seem to be something a fair amount of people run into (undoubtedly due to cultural expectations built up by big tech platforms).

@futurebird This is a really complicated one to me. On the one hand I don't think "capitalism" is broad enough, for exactly the "missing other cases" reasons you describe. Kyriarchy and terms like it are unfortunately even less widely understood, it seems.

On the other hand, a lot of people don't really seem to have an internal mental 'boundary' between the lemonade stand interpretation and the system-of-control interpretation, frequently accepting the latter under the assumption that it's a necessary counterpart of the former, and I'm not sure how else to communicate the problem with that...