Relax instance registrations to "Approval required for sign up" from current "Nobody can sign up"
I believe the current "Nobody can sign up" setting makes onboarding needlessly complex for both willing users and admins.
We can move the form interaction to the approval process proper -- people try to sign up and then we get notified and can contact them. This way we can track pending work in the Mastodon instance proper; I think it could be quite smooth.
This change would take effectively one minute :)
Thoughts?
So how should this specific proposal be voted on? I don't see a "not yet" option.
Entirely up to you, but I voted 'disagree', as I don't see the benefits yet outweighing the friction for the CWG ops team. But I wouldn't really have a problem if it went through.
As we near the original closing time, I thought of extending this proposal to keep discussing -- but then looked at the numbers and decided against it. Instead I will just let this expire and the proposal fail unless someone feels strongly that we should use this particular thread to drive consensus on some potential improvement.
My reasoning is that Disagree + Block (52%) exceed Agree + Abstain (48%), which in my reading means that there's more people actively not consenting than actively consenting at this point in time.
Thank you for your opinions and information! I will try to use the positions you expressed to inform future discussion, and update relevant documentation to link to the discussion here.
@Flancian as a next step, maybe we could form an ad-hoc committee with tech & CWG reps so that we can spec out CWG requirements for the sign up process an create a proposal that meets those while also setting the instance to invite mode
I broadly agree with what seems to be the consensus here, which is to say that there is room for improvement here but flipping the switch as-is doesn't seem like a good idea.
I've made changes to Mastodon before and would be happy to help out with that process if that's something we decide we want to do. I took a quick look at the issue tracker to see if someone has requested this before, and the closest I could find was this issue: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/10590
Hi Evan, good thoughts! Allowing custom questions on the registration form would be very welcome, but as a couple of people have suggested somewhere in the comments above, it would be better to attempt this first by working with upstream Mastodon. ( https://www.loomio.org/d/zoWFc7mR/relax-instance-registrations-to-approval-required-for-sign-up-from-current-nobody-can-sign-up-/28)
Because:
a) it would be a useful feature for Mastodon as a whole
b) we don't want to maintain a fork over time
We should first check that such a FR hasn't previously been made at https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/. If not, we should submit one to gauge interest / likelihood of merging. Flancian says here that he could not find one - https://www.loomio.org/d/zoWFc7mR/relax-instance-registrations-to-approval-required-for-sign-up-from-current-nobody-can-sign-up-/38.