I was wondering whether that could cause issues for the limited servers available, like when the mass migration from reddit happened. Would it be bad to add more accounts that would be mostly dormant? And if one does create a throwaway would it be better to delete the account afterwards.

  • fiat_lux
    21•1 year ago

    Disclaimer: I am not a Lemmy dev.

    It would add some extra rows to a database, which can increase lookup times if enough people do it with enough accounts… so from a general engineering perspective, I wouldn’t encourage it.

    In a more realistic sense, it would take a lot of people and/or a lot of throwaways to effect much difference. That is, assuming the database queries aren’t too complex or inefficient, and the servers aren’t nearing critical capacity.

    Deleting the account afterwards may not be as effective as never creating the account altogether. There’s a chance some stuff is only tombstoned instead of deleted, things get stuck in caches too, it would probably be better than keeping the dormant accounts though.

    Tl;dr It would be polite of you to keep only a couple of throwaway accounts, but I wouldn’t feel too guilty about making them. Just don’t be like a spam bot and create dozens or more.