Op is obviously trying to create drama which is being shared on Reddit to discourage people from joining Lemmy ( not lemmy.ml the instance). Any new user who would spend a bit of time would figure out that there are many instances to all tastes, if not they could create their own instance.
Honestly, it was my hope to avoid greater drama in the future. I am concerned that there will be a much larger problem down the line if people join lemmy.ml in large numbers due to events on reddit, and only come to understand afterwards what rules they have agreed to by registering their account there. If the rules are not communicated clearly ahead of time, then I think this is likely to make a lot of people very upset, and this could seriously damage the reputation and adoption of lemmy as a whole.
This is why I have attempted to clarify by commenting where others shared a link to my post in /r/lemmy, that this is only about lemmy.ml specifically as opposed to the entire network and, at least where I stand, only about a need to communicate its rules more clearly.
If email isn't working, then you'll have to turn off email verification in your instance's settings before anyone is able to log in without encountering that spinner.
To get email to work, you'll need to provide SMTP credentials in
lemmy.hjson
on the server you're using to host lemmy. An example SMTP configuration is shown in the docs here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/configuration.htmlYou may also have to restart lemmy after you update the configuration, in order for it to take effect. (I do this on my server via
docker-compose restart
.)When I set up lemmy on my server with lemmy-ansible, the config file was initially set up with a valid-looking SMTP config. But when emails weren't working I looked more closely, and it turned out that there is something broken with the SMTP service that lemmy is integrated with by default. It seems that you will need to provide your own credentials.
I'm using an SMTP service provided by a web hosting service I pay for, but you can also use gmail in a pinch: https://kinsta.com/blog/gmail-smtp-server/