Thanks for the thorough writeup! It’s worth noting that the captcha will be back in the next version, but not exactly sure when it will be released.
They removed it during the switch from web sockets (which apparently took a lot of time and effort to keep updated), but someone submitted a pull request for a non-web socket version of the captcha code, which was accepted.
So hopefully we’ll all be able to update to the new version soon.
You can create an account on a single Lemmy instance/server, and use that one account on that instance to subscribe to other communities on other instances. Those communities then show up in your subscribed “feed” on the server where your account is.
You can see all the posts from all the communities you’ve subscribed to on your feed on the instance you signed up on, without needing a client app, or you can install one of a few apps for either Android or iPhone. On these apps, you sign into your account by providing the address for your “home” Lemmy instance, and then enter your username and password for your account on that instance. Then you’ll see your feed and everything you’ve subscribed to.
You can post on any community on any server you’ve subscribed to using that one account, and your home instance will sync your posts to that community in the same way it syncs posts from your subscribed communities to your home server so you can see them when you look at your feed.
We had a good solution…
Did we? Do you know why it was removed in the first place?
Someone has already submitted a PR with the changes the dev recommended. The captcha stuff is in a new db table instead of in-memory at the websocket server.
However, from one of the devs:
One note, is that captchas (and all signup blocking methods) being optional, it still won’t prevent people from creating bot-only instances. The only effective way being to block them, or switch to allow-only federation.
Once people discover the lemmy-bots that have been made that can bypass the previous captcha method, it also won’t help (unless a new captcha method like the suggested ones above are implemented).
The root of the issue seems to be that they’ve removed websockets, for the following reasons:
Huge burden to maintain, both on the server and in lemmy-ui. Possible memory leaks. Not scalable.
I can understand them wanting to make their lives a bit easier (see "huge burden to maintain) - Lemmy has exploded recently (see “not scalable”) and there are far bigger issues to fix, and an even larger number of bad actors (see “possible memory leaks”) who have learned about Lemmy at the same time as everyone else and want to exploit or break it.
Is this a collective undertaking by a community of multiple stakeholders or is this the Dev’s individual project and they don’t have to listen to anyone?
Devs, especially extremely busy ones “listen” via pull requests. Instead of badgering the devs, put together some devs of your own, get some code working, and submit it as a PR.
If they don’t accept it, you now have code that does what you want, and it would be easy to create your own fork.
Canadian confirmed, eh.