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bytesonbike@discuss.online 2 days agoLemmy instances with those same challenges would probably just fold and close up.
Can confirm. I set up a pixelfed instance for my city with the goal of moving people from Insta to this version. After about three months, user accounts went from 1-10 signups a week to a hundred a week.
No way did that many business owners sign up. And yep, all spam.
After a while, my random weekend project in Spring became a full time job. I closed it last month.
Jason2357@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
I’ve thought of doing something similar, and think, while the federated spam is hard to deal with, signup spam is manageable if you somehow restrict signups to the actual community you want to support. Open signup on the web is a nightmare.
For a city, an interesting idea might be to only allow signups on a dedicated, physical wifi AP placed somewhere strategic in your city. People would literally have to go to a physical location to sign up. Piggy-backing on a library system would be another option if you could somehow get them to buy-in.