we have a nice thing going here, and i’m glad that about 5,500 of you are here to share it with us. it’s a new day tomorrow and i hope you’ll be here for that too

  • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgOPM
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    1 year ago

    Having to write an application is a hoop that many people won’t want to bother jumping through. Requiring users to wait for their new account to be approved is going to put many off. I suspect a lot just won’t come back to check if their account has been approved. Being rejected (especially without realizing) is going to leave a sour taste in people’s mouths and they’ll just not bother. Requiring a human to manually read applications and approve every new sign-up is obviously self-limiting.

    all of this is fine with us, to be frank with you. as i noted the other day: we’re sympathetic to people who just want a new place to be, but it’s really not on us to be that place. we didn’t sign up to be the gatekeeper of Lemmy or to get all the attention we have–that’s stuff that’s been imposed on us by other people, often disregarding how clear we make it that We’re Not Reddit, we don’t intend to be, and that our community is crafted with a specific goal in mind that necessarily cannot be inclusive of everyone.

    but again, we’re trying to smooth out the edges for everyone in between keeping this site afloat: we have a whole list of stuff we’re sending to the Lemmy devs, and we’ve already opened bug reports and feature requests to make this whole process more transparent and less painful for users. it’s just a matter of getting the people needed to work on those, which we even have a sticky on here.

    • daniel@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Thanks for being so transparent about all this.

      I think the verification period is, in practice, not something out of the ordinary. Two examples come to mind: 1. In many (most?) larger Facebook groups, you’re asked to answer questions and your application gets manually assessed by a moderator before being let in. Very similar to how it works here. 2. While you can get a new reddit account in seconds, you are blocked from many subreddits for 24> hours as an anti-spam/trolling measure and there are often karma thresholds for subreddits as well.

      The first week or so with a new reddit account really sucks, but here I’m up and running without any artificial restrictions within hours of submitting my signup form.