I plan to have people type an application to register but will deny creeps and obviously bots. What would be the best questions to ask/way to tell that someone is a creep with ill intentions?
I have some ideas, but I’m looking for more, actual ideas from the Lemmy community. Ex: (if I make it a 13+ instance) What age range do you plan on interacting with? What do you plan on talking about with these people? What do you plan to do here?
Make it invite only.
More importantly, be very careful and super picky about what instances you federate with. If you’re federated with an instance that has CSAM uploaded to it, you’re now hosting CSAM on your server.
What does that abbreviation mean? Never seen it before.
Child Sexual Abuse Material
Ah yikes, yeah that must be defederated. Thanks for the clarification
I’d just have users submit pictures of their feet
At some point, the vetting process will end up being more time consuming than actively moderating the instance, it will still not be 100% effective.
You still need to actively moderate the instance no matter what, but having registration applications makes it easier to weed out most of the bad stuff. It also stops a cross-instance spammer who makes multiple accounts with the same username from posting until they get approved (which I check when the application form is somewhat generic).
Some weirdos are private about it. In that case, approve them if they appear “normal” but if they’re caught being weird (with proof), ban them.
For the weirdos who will be open about it (ex: I’ve seen some people in their bio who say stuff like 35M looking for 15F or younger), they may outright tell you who they plan on interacting with and what they plan on talking about.
How many people do you want on it? If not so many manual registration might be the way.
Be careful asking too many questions as most people won’t read and you’ll end up denying perfectly fine users. You’ll also end up reading essays for each application, which is tedious at best. A simple, “what about <this Lemmy instance> makes you want to join us instead of another instance?” would probably work perfectly fine.
I was planning similar, but just for me instead of allowing registrations at all, not sure how viable that actually is though.
