There has been a considerable increase in bot activity and malicious content posting on Lemmy recently.
Fortunately our little instance has been mostly spared so far, but I do worry that this may change at any moment.
In an effort to protect Lemdit and ensure its long term survival, we now require registration applications to be submitted by new users wanting to join us.
I've kept it short and authentic people will always be welcomed here, it just means that joining is not instantaneous anymore. I personally dislike registration applications, but I feel like protecting what we already have is more important than convenience and there aren't any better measures available yet.
Hopefully this will change as Lemmy evolves, I know the devs are working hard to find better solutions.
A couple of days ago a newcomer started a new community called "Controversial ideas" and began posting content.
I originally took it at face value, however it quickly became apparent that the "controversial ideas" were all just different angles of trying to normalize relationships between adults and under-age teenagers, under the guise of pseudo-intellectual debate on age of consent laws, brain development, etc.
A bit of digging made it clear that this was an individual with an agenda. He had started similar communities on several other instances using different usernames, all with the same objective and approach. His multitude of other social media accounts told a similar story and included real hot takes such as this one:
This individual has been banned and the community removed.
I don't know how much clearer I can make it that this kind of shit isn't and will never be tolerated here.
Seeing as this was the second pedophile that tried to set up shop here in the past month, I've become a bit concerned that there may be something about our previous mascot that is giving off the wrong impression. Maybe the mouse is too childish? Maybe it looks too young? I really don't know, but I've decided to change it just in case.
Our new mascot is much more aggressive, hopefully it sends the right message. I welcome your feedback on it.
Lemmy 0.18.4 was released today and Lemdit has been updated to it.
You may have noticed a 5 minute outage earlier while this was happening.
This release is mostly a bug fix, which is welcomed news. You can find the full release notes here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/RELEASES.md
As always, please let me know if you encounter any weird behavior.
@delendum
@lemdit.com