This sounds like something Lemmy would also really benefit from.
This is something a lot of forums and more private/restricted communities had years ago. It creates a barrier, and if some specific community wants to activate that - sure. But for most instances and communities it’s not relevant.
Lemmy has it (or did) already. Some instances use it, many don’t.
No, there is only a very basic option that implements maybe a third of what Pixelfed does now.
Is there something more to it that’s not highlighted in the linked blog post?
Did you read the entire blog post?
Lemmy’s system gives no feedback to applicants at all and is a single input field that offers no guided onboarding what so ever. It’s not even a proof of concept compared to what the blog post describes for Pixelfed.
Yes, however without experience with Lemmy’s implementation, it wasn’t clear what the differences were. From what I’ve read of Lemmy’s basic implementation, i.e. submit a reason with your registration/application, this didn’t sound that far from it.
As I read it, Pixelfed’s request for more information form is a good addition (better than the awkward roundabout way you’d have to handle it otherwise, as I think I recall seeing come up with Lemmy), albeit as it’s optional we’ll have to see how well it’s used in practice.
This is very good from an admin or moderators perspective.
It makes it harder for new people to get into the fediverse, though. I’d love a version of this that helps new users find the right community.
It would be interesting if something like this federated out to other communities. I’d provide info about me as I feel comfortable, and what I want out of an instance of that federated service. Any community that signed up for it would get a notice of my interest and they could ask for more info or accept or deny me. Instead of the one response I could have many options at the end of it.
It would help me find smaller more closed instances without having to know about them, but still leave the control over whether they want to get to know me in their admin’s hands.
