I’m not sure about that. What if advertising were used to cover server costs, just like donations right now? Then the community may be fine with it.

But I think it’s very dangerous to go down that route. Because it’s going to become about higher profits, not just covering costs, in the long run.

What you can do is install wireguard server at home and then set your phone to use that wireguard connection always. That’s what I do and then my pihole at home filters all my mobile traffic as well.

You can rent an instance for like 10 dollars per month and grow from there. Then expand if you get users and things get slow. Lemmy runs ok on 4 GB of memory but it’s better with 8 GB. Postgres use the most.

It’s what we all loved about the internet I think, before the web become… “that” (looking at the pile of shit the web has become).

But actually it’s not the web, not really. It’s the big tech platforms that most people seem to think is the internet now. It’s sad to watch how people log on to “Facebook” and not the general web anymore. And then Google in front of everything, like a big cancer growth.

Lemmy is not the new internet either I believe. But it’s here to show people that something else can exist. As soon as we let advertising in here though, it’s over.

I’ve been there a few times, but will log in more and catch up. :)

In all for trying it. Will enable it tomorrow then. Thanks!

Thank you, it does make sense. We will enable it tomorrow. This thread changed my mind. :)

Yeah it makes sense. After reading all the arguments here, I guess if it helps to slow down spammers, it’s a good idea. Let’s do it. :)

I will enable it tomorrow and I would be very grateful for some extra admin help. I will contact you tomorrow. :)

Yeah I didnt see this until now. Thanks!

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.

It’s very nice, and thanks for including all instances. We are supposed to be a network of Lemmy instances working together. This site highlights that idea so thank you.

If I could offer an improvement idea, it would be to first show instances that are down in it’s own group, and then every other instance exactly as it’s done now, in alphabetical order.

Well everyone else is extreamly overpriced. I work with cloud environments as part of my job, and its silly the amount of money being spent on AWS.

“Pay for what you use” is more like “pay us for every little thing that would be free if you owned the server”.

I’m glad LW is hosted there too, it’s a good service and really good customer service as well.

Could be but there was a button at the top of the scanning site where I could push to make a fresh scan. And still it shows up as phishing.

Very mysterious but it will be interesting to find out why…

Im the instance owner of lemmy.today. I contacted fortinet about this and will share their response when it comes.

The instance is running latest version of the default lemmy software on a rented server by Hetzner, so Im very curious what they say about this. There is nothing else on it. :)

Join mine, it needs more users, specially active ones. :)

Thank you, added at least 15 communities from this list. :)

And nice to see at least some communities that aren’t from Lemmy.world or Lemmy.ml. I think it’s really important for the health of the fediverse to have many active communities across many different instances.

That’s actually really interesting. What’s the purpose of so many inactive accounts at once?

Seems to be enough to have a few of them, and not a million accounts since it clearly will rise suspicion… :)

Very good that you found them. Fascinating.

Maybe an attempt to try and make the fediverse look more active than it was back then, to get headlines about how it has explosive growth etc. It was June and everything really took off then.

If an instance becomes too dominant, users actually love it.

Example: Lemmy.world :)

Some users just want to melt in to the crowd I guess.

I have my own domain and i love it. In fact, it’s going to become more and more important knowing how to self host things. Big tech is extreamly preditory.

Meta and Twitter are social media companies. They have access to peoples tweets. It’s similar to having access to these messages you and me are typing, except many people use their own names there.

It’s not too bad privacy wise, just social messages.

Google on the other hand has the private searches of billions of people. Everything you put into a search engine because you are worried, afraid, sick, or curious about something.

Google records all this private activity and saves it under your personal profile, and then uses cookies to track every web site you are visiting on the web (using not only Google search but Google analytics cookies that exists on almost every website).

They also combine this data with whatever you are doing on your android phone, or what places you go to using Google maps, or what video meetings you are having with Google meets, what emails you have in Google Mail, what video you watch on YouTube, what calendar events you are having with Google calendar… And so on.

Then they feed all this data into algorithms designed to figure out what you are likely to do next. They sell this data to advertisers so they can target you with ads. They also send this data to American agencies like nsa to be stored and analyzed.

There is a giant difference here between Google and the other companies you mentioned. Google is literally watching moments from people’s entire lives, while the others only see your social media messages.

This is why Google is completely absurdly in it’s own class of anti-privacy. No other company has this amount of data about people’s every moment awake.

Now they use their dominant position to try and take over the entire web, so it’s not possible to escape them anymore using a different browser, blocking cookies and tracking, or using another search engine.

If everyone is forced to use their browser, we have lost everything good about the web.

They should be treated like the cancer to a free web they really are.