Are there any instances that accept new users without requiring email verification? I live under a brutal dictatorship and I cannot afford to have my social media accounts associated with my real identity. I get that it’s an anti-spam thing but users like me are getting left in the dust in the transition from Lemmy to PieFed because of this.
this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2025
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Yes, it's quite common but I don't want to show that information as it'd make life too easy for spammers.
Anyway you can use a throwaway email service like https://sorry.idont.date/ and even if they have registration applications turned on (many don't) and the person processing your application notices you're using a throwaway that will just be one factor in the approve/decline decision.
do unto others as you have done
It'd be nice to know at a glance which instances allow Tor or VPN
Mine does, and I'll work to keep it that way.
What does newbie friendly mean? What would make an instance not newbie friendly?
An instance with 3 or more topics is newbie friendly. Topics are bundles of communities that are shown to new accounts during their initial on-boarding and by choosing some topics they automatically join all the communities in those topics.
I'm finding that pretty much every instance has 3 or more so this filter is not so useful, except to exclude development and testing instances. I'm not sure where we'll end up on that.
I think this would benefit from admin input for the newbie value.
My instance, being around anarchy and complex social and political topics, is NOT newbie friendly. I would think having a way for admins to rate their instance, and potentially a text field to explain why/why not would be useful.
Love to see it!
I've noticed the speed icons can fluctuate rapidly from one page reload to another, could that be smoothed out to an 'average' each daily cron or something?
And I think displaying user count or some sort of activity indicator could help make better informed choices.
The speed icons are generated each page load, by making a request to each server. The request comes from the client browser so generally the closer an instance is to the viewer, the higher they'll rank for that person. Everyone will get different results and depending on how much load the instance is under and general network conditions they could get somewhat different results each time.
I intentionally omitted user count because that will make people cluster together on the biggest instances, which is not healthy for the network overall. The instance-choosing websites for Lemmy, Mastodon and others all make this crucial mistake.
Tarte being in test, true to its identity XD
I haven't noticed it. XD
😍