#ActivityPub #Fediverse #Mastodon #OpenRegistrationHurts @alice made a downright AMAZING post about the perils of open registration a while ago, and I suggest you go show them some attention.

#ActivityPub #Fediverse #Mastodon #OpenRegistrationHurts @alice made a downright AMAZING post about the perils of open registration a while ago, and I suggest you go show them some attention. But some of the discussion on that post got me thinking. The main reason people don't want manual account approval, it seems, is because of the time it takes. So, I propose a third registration mode. This would require no extra modifications to ActivityPub and perhaps one minor tweak to nodeinfo (1/?)

This mode would be a sort of "in-between" thing. A user would register an account and would be immediately able to log in, see posts, follow users, the lot. Here's the kicker, however: none of those actions would *go through* until mods approved the account. So you could sign up, post all you want, comment stuff, like, boost, the lot, but it wouldn't be visible to anyone (including local users) until a moderator approved you. (2/?)

@GroupNebula563 So, shadow bans.

Once the moderator approved your account, all your actions would go through, get federated (where applicable) and backdated accordingly. This would also mean that moderators would be able to look at the user's pending actions to get a better sense of whether to approve them or not. Of course, the user would be notified when signing up of this, some sort of little banner at the top of your screen that says "your account and interactions are currently pending moderator approval" or the like. (3/3)

@GroupNebula563 I've discussed this "sandboxed mode" at some length with folx, and while I still think it's a great idea (if implemented correctly) it does have some issues...

Namely that it could be an adoption sink—as in, you sign up, start posting and replying, and seemingly *no one* acknowledges you. So you give up and don't log in again.

Will that happen with any more frequency than folx who already sign up, post once or twice, and then never log in again? I don't know.

Does it make mods' job easier? Sort of. It can give us more info to make a decision on without actually soliciting it from the user. I like this.

Will it stop spams/scams/trolls? *If* they can't tell if they're still in the sandbox, then it makes being shitty an effort with no payout, so they're less likely to do it. Plus, it nips LLMs and the like pretty hard, which I'm a huge fan of.

Over all? I think it's a good idea, but care for rejection-sensitive users is warranted.

@alice I think it would be good to have a little warning as you sign up, perhaps on the rules page. I say the rules page because that’s the one you’re supposed to read thoroughly and it’s also the one that bad actors are likely to skip without reading. That way, genuine users are more likely to see it while bad actors are less likely to see it.

alice@lgbtqia.space pretty much said everything I wanted to say (and better, to boot.)

One thing I do want to point out is that this doesn't remove the actual burden of account approvals, it merely reduces the urgency of them. In fact it might increase the moderation burden somewhat since they have to read through their queued activity as well.

Technically it is doable, but no software I know of does this except NodeBB. We have a post queue that can (and should) be configured to automatically queue posts by new users.

groupnebula563@mastodon.social

@julian it saves having to read application question answers, at the cost of having to review a couple posts. I can say from experience, a single reported bad actor causes more work than a several application reviews.

@GroupNebula563