These are Lemmy instances with a “Sign Up” link which present you with a form to fill out to register. Then after you fill out the form and supply information like email address to the server, they respond with “registration closed”:
- lemmy.escapebigtech.info (dead node now, but got instant reg. closed msg when they were alive)
- expats.zone
- hackertalks.com
- lemmie.be
- lemmy.killtime.online
- lemmy.kmoneyserver.com
- lemmy.sarcasticdeveloper.com
- level-up.zone
- zoo.splitlinux.org
I suppose it’s unlikely to be malice considering how many there are. It’s likely a case of shitty software design. There should be a toggle for open/closed registration and when it’s closed there should be no “Sign Up” button in the first place. And if someone visits the registration URL despite a lack of Sign Up link, it should show a reg. closed announcement.
Guess it’s worth mentioning there are some instances that accept your application for review (often with interview field) but then either let your application rot (“pending application” forever) or they silently reject it (you only discover non-acceptance when you make a login attempt and either get “login failed” or even more rudely it just re-renders the login form with no msg). These nodes fall into the selective non-acceptance category:
- lemmy.cringecollective.io
- lemmy.techtriage.guru
- lemmy.hacktheplanet.be (pretends to send confirmation email then silently neglects to)
- links.esq.social
- dubvee.org
To be fair, I use a disposable email address which could be a reason the 5 above to reject my application. And if they did give a reason via email, I would not see it. Not sure if that’s happening but that’s also a case of bad software. That is, when a login attempt is made, the server could present the rationale for refusal. Another software defect would be failing to instantly reject an unacceptible email address.
I would love to put my code where my mouth is. It’s on my long list of projects. The defects I describe in this thread probably do not justify a forking effort and I’m not enthusiastic about learning JavaScript, which is not just a shitty language but also it’s the wrong tool for the job. Although Rust is probbly a decent choice for the backend (but Ada would probably be better).
The biggest deficiency is that there is no decent threadiverse desktop client. I am just baffled that a majority of threadiverse users are using phones. There are like a dozen different mobile clients to choose from and not a single decent client for the desktop. So if I build anything it will be a proper client for a sensibly sized screen (non-portable).
As for fixing the defects exposed in this thread, the upstream Lemmy devs are rather stubborn but I think devs of an existing fork (Lenny?) might be more open to improvements.
Who would use a well-designed variant? You can see from the thread that millennials & gen Zers actually expect designs that prioritise the anti-bot agenda above the needs of both the direct user (the admin) and the end user. A majority of the population does not see how Google, Spamhaus, and Microsoft have broken email. This threadiverse crowd entered after email was already ruined. The emotional attachment to gmail (calling it what it is.. there is no generic netneutral email infra anymore) trumps software that avoids the dog food problem. I might be the sole user of such software, especially if I also code it to enforce decentralisation (which would necessarily include anti-centralisation features that would be unpopular).