Is this Instance Down?

to have not actually had an account yet makes it pretty obvious when you try to login and fail that the application has not been accepted.

That would be a blunt non-transparent/non-specific message to send. It’s not obvious /why/ the reg was denied.

If the instance admins wanted to talk about it, they’d have emailed you; or published some means of contacting them outside lemmy.

Lemmy software is designed as comms software itself with email address disclosure optional. An admin can make it mandatory, but Lemmy’s design should cater for the email-free option regardless of how an admin toggles that setting.

I wouldn’t expect to receive the reason for refusing the application via any other means than the email I’d provided in that application.

I get that. People are accustomed to relying on email. But this is not an excuse for software deficiencies.

That’s the entire purpose of providing an email; so you could be contacted when/if there are updates to your applications status.

That can be accomplished without email. Email is a convenience at best. Some users have decided email is an inconvenience and do not use it. And Lemmy supports that -- partially.

Let’s be clear about who the software is expected to serve. The comms feature of giving feedback to users without an email account is not to directly serve the end user. Software should serve its user (the Lemmy admin in this case). A Lemmy admin does not want to take the time to express themselves on their decision only to have their msg blackholed. They don’t necessarily know that an email address is disposable. The end user benefits by extension, but it’s about creating software that serves the direct user of the s/w. If you’re an admin who makes email optional, you might still want to be able to get a msg to a user.

The core purpose of the Lemmy platform is communication. So relying on out-of-band tech is kind of embarrassing. Think of it from the dog food angle. An in-band msg has the advantage that the admin has more control (e.g. they can edit a msg later and they can know whether the msg has been fetched). Lemmy relying on email as a primary means of comms is a dog food problem.

The only sensible concession I would see to make is that there are a hell of a lot more important things for Lemmy devs to work on because the software has a lot of relatively serious defects. I’m talking about how great software would be coded, but extra diligent handling of denials should have a low triage in the big scheme of the state of where Lemmy is right now.

The cognitive dissonance in this

It seems you don’t know what that phrase means. It doesn’t follow from anything else you wrote why you think that.

You don’t think providing an email from a throw away service would strike the software as a malicious user/spam bot???

You don’t think that legitimate streetwise users secure themselves by supplying disposable email addresses???

You keep talking like you know everything

The post intends to solicit intelligent and civil discourse with logical reasoning, not the sort of ego-charged emotional hot-headed pissing contest you’re trying to bring here.