Hello everyone on asklemmy. I’m new to the lemmyverse and enjoy the communities and people here :) But now my question is: what’s the difference between creating an account on a server where you have to go through a whole series of steps? I don’t know if that’s the case, but I feel like there’s a difference between an account on a server where I have to go through a whole registration process and get approved manually and an account that I can “just” register and use. I don’t understand the difference since I can interact with all communities on all servers. Thank you in advance!
From a technical standpoint, there is no real difference, it comes down to how the instance owner feels it’s best to run the server.
Ultimately, instances (or at least the ones most people want to join) want to keep rulebreakers, trolls and spam out. There are two main ways of doing this:
- Proactively: By attempting to prevent bad actors from signing up in the first place.
- Reactively: Allow everyone to sign up, and ban bad actors when they misbehave.
Of course, there is a lot of debate as to which of these methods are better (beehaw, for example, fundamentally doesn’t think a reactive approach can work at all), which causes tension between some instances.
This tension can rise to a point where one instance “defederates” from another, meaning they stop talking to each other and you can’t interact with one if you have an account with the other.
