There has been a huge wave of spam accounts recently, and I recognize some of the names on this list. Of course these accounts gets banned quickly.
Getting a fake email address is really easy, so I don’t think it makes any difference whatsoever. On fastmail which im using, I can even create fake ones with a click on a button. It’s built into the service to have different emails for different sites.
Having closed signups will not stop any spam accounts. It just adds a delay between registration and being able to log in. There is no way to know if it’s a spam account or not before they sign in. Of course, some of the names in the list makes it obvious, but they just change to ordinary sounding names then.
I think it’s frustrating for new users to have to wait for a random time period to get accepted, specially when it serves no purpose. I’m not going to be any wiser if I approve the registration now or 12 hours later.
Or am I wrong? I haven’t been a troll myself but seems like I would just spend 30 mins to make accounts in random instances and then fire off my bot a few hours later or on the day after.
How do you know which accounts are spam accounts before they even started posting?
If the spammers and trolls manage to make you defederate from Lemmy.today, they will pick another instance. And every defederation will continue to make the fediverse smaller and more centralized. Sooner or later, small instances may even stop accepting new users for fear of being defederated from the larger network.
I would like to stop having these spam accounts and trolls on the instance. I could add email verification but it won’t make a difference and just make it more annoying for new users. I really don’t want to punish them for what trolls and spammers are doing.
But sure, I prefer it to defederation. So if you think it makes a difference, I could add it just as a sign of good faith. But it’s really a pointless gesture.