I would encourage every Fediverse software project to implement a “dead-man switch" on registrations: if nobody with moderator permissions has been active in the last week, then disable new account creation.

The Fediverse has a significant number of abandoned instances that are used by bad actors to create accounts and send spam.

We implemented this in Mastodon (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/29318) and it has been highly effective.

Automatically switch from open to approved registrations in absence of moderators by ClearlyClaire · Pull Request #29318 · mastodon/mastodon

This is not meant to replace #29280, but supplement it to avoid unmonitored servers keeping open registrations indefinitely. Automatically switch away from open registrations if no user with the pe...

GitHub
@renchap unfortunately that's not merged yet, is it?
@renchap actually, I was thinking of this one: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/25032
Add support for server-specific emergency rules by ClearlyClaire · Pull Request #25032 · mastodon/mastodon

Supersedes #24986 Provides an (eventually) admin-editable set of rules made of triggers and actions. The goal is not to triage spammers and abusers from legitimate users, but to provide a stop-gap ...

GitHub
@thisismissem It has been merged and quickly backported into a 4.2 patch version