Sad but probably necessary:

     Because Riseup does not tie user account creation to a phone number
     or credit card information, many people attempt to obtain Riseup
     accounts for the purpose of sending spam or phishing email.
     In the past, we asked people to write a short description of their
     activism in order to try to eliminate these scammers. Unfortunately,
     over the years, this has been excellent training for teaching
     scammers how to sound *exactly* like activists. It got to the point
     where if an account request sounded too inspiring and awesome, it
     was probably fake. This has been a huge problem for us.
     Another problem is that whenever a Riseup bird leaves their cozy
     nest, someone always mentions that they tried to get a Riseup
     account and were rejected. Many apologies! We were not judging you.
     It is likely that you sounded too wonderful and therefore seemed
     like a scammer.
     In light of this, we have made two changes:
     (1) We have removed the ability to request a new account.
     (2) We have simplified the process of creating a new account with an
     invite.
     It now only requires a single invite in order to create an account,
     and every user is able to create more invites. In order to create an
     invite for someone, log in to account.riseup.net.
     To prevent abuse, new users are not immediately able to create
     invites. We are hopeful this will make life better for everyone.

   Rr