Hello everyone!

Its almost time for another Lemmy update, this time to a fairly major release! I’ve held back on updating our instance here immediately just to make sure there are no ground-breaking issues, however it seems like no one is reporting any major issues with 0.18.0 which is a good sign.

Assuming nothing comes up, The Outpost will be updating to 0.18.0 on Tuesday @ 3AM UTC and a maintenance notice will be provided on the status page just like last time to provide communication of the update.

One small caveat is that the captcha will not be available in 0.18.0 (and will return in 0.18.1) which while isn’t a guaranteed deterrent against bots, it is at least something. Like a good chunk of instances out there, signing up requires approval via an application which looks like this:

To verify that you are human, please explain why you want to create an account on this site (or simply, your favorite food will do as well!)

However it wouldn’t exactly be that hard to tie in a LLM to provide a generated response, and there are reports of exactly that occurring already.

So, in effort to try to combat against bot/spam registrations, The Outpost will be requiring email verification in order to register for an account (which was actually already the case at the very start of this instance’s lifecycle, but due to reported bugs with 0.17.3 it was disabled to make sure it wasn’t preventing legitimate users from signing up / logging in).

To those who do not know why bots/spam is a bad thing aside from the obvious, it can cause harm to remote communities/instances, and that goes against one of the core rules of this instance.

That being said, anyone who has an account here has been “grandfathered in” so to speak - or in other words, all current accounts have been marked as having their email verified (and if an email wasn’t originally provided, a naX@example.com was filled in just to make sure Lemmy didn’t “freak out” over a verified-but-blank email address).

Do note: Updating your email address will trigger re-verification as to be expected, and to my knowledge you won’t be able to log back in until the new address has been verified.

At some point if there is a better alternative to combating bot/spam applications then email verification can be disabled again (thus making providing an email address optional).

For new folks who are wanting to potentially register at The Outpost (or many of the other Lemmy instances that require email verification) if you do not want to give out your main email address I’d recommend using something such as Firefox Relay (which is what I use), Apple’s “Hide My Email” service, any other similar service, or even just a burner email address (you only need it to confirm your account, though it is also the only way to reset your password should you lose access to your account).

If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to let me know (via a comment, a DM, or on Matrix.

Edit: We should be all set now! I’ll leave this post pinned over the next day as a “just in case” though.