Registrations should require a valid email address and temporary/disposable (e.g. temp-mail.org ) email services should be rejected.
Note this should not be implemented as a whitelist; “obscure” email services such as Protonmail, Tutanota and personal email servers should be allowed.
Pros:
- Cuts down on the number of trolls attempting to register, reducing load on mods and admins.
- Improves our standing with other instances.
- Ensures users have the ability to reset their password.
Cons:
- Has privacy concerns - people may not want to associate their email address with everything.
- Users may not (and perhaps should not have to) trust the admins of this instance with their email.
- May not be supported well by Lemmy, and/or require a blacklist that needs updating.
Aye and nay in the comments, please.
So we already have that. What I mean is an additional layer by requiring email addresses that have a more cumbersome registration process (not all that cumbersome for a legit user, cumbersome for someone trying to flood an instance).
Anyone can make a couple hotmail (for example) accounts, but it’s a bigger pain in the ass than going to a temp mail site and getting a ton of inboxes going. Effort v. Incentive is the idea here - if you’re a troll just trying to disrupt for the sake of disruption, if it takes you 5-10 minutes per account creation attempt from start to finish, you’re probably going to focus your efforts on something faster to spin up. A latched door prevents opportunists and all that.
Does it stop everyone/the most dedicated trolls? No. But it narrows the funnel.
Edit to acknowledge after reading more of this thread and thinking about it more, I’ve voted Nay - let’s see if the instance CAPTCHA is a sufficient barrier for this purpose first.
I really feel like it’s just too easy to whip an email together with Gmail for this to have much impact. I like the goal here but I think we would need to find a different solution.