4d ago

One of these days, I plan to create my own Lemmy instance. What’s the best way to filter out weirdos during registration?

I plan to have people type an application to register but will deny creeps and obviously bots. What would be the best questions to ask/way to tell that someone is a creep with ill intentions?

I have some ideas, but I’m looking for more, actual ideas from the Lemmy community. Ex: (if I make it a 13+ instance) What age range do you plan on interacting with? What do you plan on talking about with these people? What do you plan to do here?

19 comments

Make it invite only.
More importantly, be very careful and super picky about what instances you federate with. If you're federated with an instance that has CSAM uploaded to it, you're now hosting CSAM on your server.
- What does that abbreviation mean? Never seen it before.
  
  Child Sexual Abuse Material

At some point, the vetting process will end up being more time consuming than actively moderating the instance, it will still not be 100% effective.
- You still need to actively moderate the instance no matter what, but having registration applications makes it easier to weed out most of the bad stuff. It also stops a cross-instance spammer who makes multiple accounts with the same username from posting until they get approved (which I check when the application form is somewhat generic).

Pre-register the UniversalMonk account and all his sock puppets.
Not a complete list:
UniversalMonk
DonaldJMusk
Area72
realcaseyrollins
barrygoldwater
At the very least this strips them of any notoriety.
- Only one of those is me though. I have nothing to do with those other people. I don't have any alt names; only alt instances.
  People are totally free to block people on that list if they want to, but has nothing to do with me, friend.
  Your account is only 5 days old. So seems like you have some sort of alt thing going on.

Make it invite-only.

Some weirdos are private about it. In that case, approve them if they appear “normal” but if they’re caught being weird (with proof), ban them.
For the weirdos who will be open about it (ex: I’ve seen some people in their bio who say stuff like 35M looking for 15F or younger), they may outright tell you who they plan on interacting with and what they plan on talking about.

Be careful asking too many questions as most people won't read and you'll end up denying perfectly fine users. You'll also end up reading essays for each application, which is tedious at best. A simple, "what about
<this Lemmy instance>
makes you want to join us instead of another instance?" would probably work perfectly fine.
- most people won't read and you'll end up denying perfectly fine users.
  I think that is a good outcome and that any such people are absolutely not "perfectly fine," correspondingly. I also think the count of such people would be very low in the first place.

How many people do you want on it? If not so many manual registration might be the way.

I'd just have users submit pictures of their feet

I was planning similar, but just for me instead of allowing registrations at all, not sure how viable that actually is though.

Not sure if it's still the case, but I recall my instance had a phrase hidden within the rules page that you had to find and include in your application.

19 comments