It sounds snarky, but I don't mean it that way. I like the guy who runs lobste.rs and I'm happy he published the code, and I'd really like HN to have some real competition. But, sorry, nobody uses lobste.rs. It's a ghost town.

For what it's worth, I think the answer to site quality isn't pre-filtering users; it's having a simple process to nuke bad users. Lobste.rs put a big bet on pre-filtering; it hasn't worked out. I'm not surprised; one thing I look for on great HN threads is the random first-party (owner of company, primary author of package, &c) commenter who joins just to comment on that story, which is something that can't happen in the pre-filter model.