Not very difficult if you have an online presence somewhere you can use as proof that you will act in good-faith. Having a hacker news account for instance can make joining as easy as sending someone an e-mail (as I did) and asking. It is a website much more built upon trust, and so if you invite someone and they get banned for something, you are directly connected to that.

For more see: https://lobste.rs/about#invitations and the user invite tree https://lobste.rs/users

Disregard sibling comment

From the about page

> The quickest way to receive an invitation is to talk to someone you recognize from the site. If you wrote a link that was posted, please reach out in chat, we'd love to have you join the community. Finally, if you can't find anyone you know in the invitation tree and didn't author something posted to the site, consider getting to know the community in the chat room.

Chat: https://lobste.rs/chat

I used to be active in chat and invited many users but I'm not that active now.

Fork the repo, deal with an open issue and humbly ask if you could get an invite... seems like that could be the ticket.

Thanks! That's an interesting approach for filtering new joiners.