Speaking from experience, they could fix their spam and abuse woes very easily by just closing new signups or restricting it in some way. Simplest would be invite-only (built-in feature of Mastodon), or restrict the signups page based on IP range whitelist/blacklist.
:pawoo: Announcement!
Thank you for always using Pawoo.
Due to server congestion, new registrations will now require approval by a moderator.
Thank you very much for your cooperation.
The nature of a site like reddit (and lemmy and all other alternatives) means a large userbase is necessary. Not at the expense of CSAM, but also everyone trying to gatekeep lemmy doesn't realise that we'll die a slow death unless the fediverse grows by at least 10-20x.
I swear, Lemmy users act like they are completely in favor of an instance of 40 users and a submission every other week. Seeing scale as inherently bad.
Lemmy will fucking roll over and die within the year.
Absolutely brain-dead speculation based on literally nothing. Complicit in what??? The current owner is a very public figure, so they gain nothing and have everything to lose. It's just pure incompetence and mismanagement.
People prefer using this term over CP because the word "porn" is considered too soft. Porn is generally a consensual, adult medium made with adults for adults. CP is not that, it's first and foremost harm of a child.
Another reason is that "CP" got jokingly coopted by abusers in the form of various dogwhistles (e.g.: "cheese pizza"). It made more sense to adopt a new acronym rather than try to uphold any sense of decorum while sharing ownership of the term w/ edgelords & predators.