this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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Asklemmy

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 12 hours ago

Not sure if it's still the case, but I recall my instance had a phrase hidden within the rules page that you had to find and include in your application.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 16 hours ago

I'd just have users submit pictures of their feet

[–] [email protected] 14 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

What does that abbreviation mean? Never seen it before.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Child Sexual Abuse Material

[–] [email protected] 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Ah yikes, yeah that must be defederated. Thanks for the clarification

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

Not only is it gross, it's also enough to jail you since you technically store and distribute these materials.

Laws didn't really update for the Fediverse.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 21 hours ago

Pre-register the UniversalMonk account and all his sock puppets.

Not a complete list:

  • UniversalMonk
  • DonaldJMusk
  • Area72
  • realcaseyrollins
  • barrygoldwater

At the very least this strips them of any notoriety.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 21 hours ago

I was planning similar, but just for me instead of allowing registrations at all, not sure how viable that actually is though.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 22 hours ago

Make it invite-only.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

How many people do you want on it? If not so many manual registration might be the way.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

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 makes you want to join us instead of another instance?" would probably work perfectly fine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

most people won't read and you'll end up denying perfectly fine users.

I think that is a good outcome and that any such people are absolutely not "perfectly fine," correspondingly. I also think the count of such people would be very low in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

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 spammers who makes multiple accounts with the same name from posting until they get approved (which I check when the application form is somewhat generic).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 23 hours ago

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.