So, lemmy seems to be flooded with spam bot accounts at the moment. Look through the table of servers on fedidb (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy) and notice how there are these huge instances without any active users (MAU).
Also notice how startrek.website has 9000 users for 276 active users this month.
From memory, when I signed up, there was no email requirement or captcha or anything.
Admins … maybe you want to tighten things up?
geoblocking is also a bit of a blunt instrument, many people either use network wide VPNs or even sometimes the ISPs IP blocks are mislocated (my work ISP has my IP in a different state)
For sure! If I were running a more general and globally focused instance that would be a larger concern. I understand using a VPN in North America, but not so much from other countries. I guess my vision is that it’s only really locals accessing the site for the most part. If someone is travelling out of the country, they can equivalently use a U.S. based VPN server.
I suppose my example of Arizona came across as the proposed bounds of my geoblock. I’d probably just say “North America” to avoid the issues of remote workers using a company VPN to access the site (please don’t though, your company probably doesn’t like that - the current version of lemmy is VERY bandwidth inefficient )
Also, consider that I can use one Geoblock for my signup page, and different, more permissive one for the login page which should make things a bit more reasonable.