Having to write an application is a hoop that many people won’t want to bother jumping through. Requiring users to wait for their new account to be approved is going to put many off. I suspect a lot just won’t come back to check if their account has been approved. Being rejected (especially without realizing) is going to leave a sour taste in people’s mouths and they’ll just not bother. Requiring a human to manually read applications and approve every new sign-up is obviously self-limiting.

all of this is fine with us, to be frank with you. as i noted the other day: we’re sympathetic to people who just want a new place to be, but it’s really not on us to be that place. we didn’t sign up to be the gatekeeper of Lemmy or to get all the attention we have–that’s stuff that’s been imposed on us by other people, often disregarding how clear we make it that We’re Not Reddit, we don’t intend to be, and that our community is crafted with a specific goal in mind that necessarily cannot be inclusive of everyone.

but again, we’re trying to smooth out the edges for everyone in between keeping this site afloat: we have a whole list of stuff we’re sending to the Lemmy devs, and we’ve already opened bug reports and feature requests to make this whole process more transparent and less painful for users. it’s just a matter of getting the people needed to work on those, which we even have a sticky on here.