Stux from geddit.social think that the massive recent wave of ~100k new Lemmy accounts is likely mostly spammers. Captchas suck, but are they better than the alternative?
The upcoming v0.18 of Lemmy is set to remove Captchas, I’ve got a feeling this problem is about to get a WHOLE lot worse.
Now there’s an open issue to bring them back :)
Great! Have you also commented on it? Have others here who are reading this and also concerned about this issue commenting on it?
Right now I think the Devs need to see how much impact they’re creating here and with how little people are weighing in, I really don’t think they’re fully understanding the implications.
Just because an issue exists means NOTHING. It’s a ticket, a work item, something that could choose to be discarded.
Additionally, just because the issue exists makes no guarantee that we’ll retain Captcha functionality in v0.18.
they’re also looking into alternate ways to prevent spam bots: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3204
It’s always been up to instance admins to decide for themselves between the tradeoff of creating manual signup friction in order to reduce spam, or remove it in order to quickly scale for more users. This might remove a tool for now, but I think more tools will be added as alternatives.