this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

If it's to protect your identity from some embarrassing content you're afraid of tying with your main account then it's fine.

If it's to skirt the rules of a community or instance then you're just pushing the instance admins into making it harder for everyone to make throwaway accounts in the future.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 32 points 11 months ago

My stance is if a service is totally cool with 1000+ bots, you making 2-3 accounts a year isn't a problem.

The root issue isn't quantity of accounts, but malicious users causing trouble.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It would add extra length to the queues for instances that manually approve new users.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

I like that.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Only if you use them to do shitty things.

[–] TacoButtPlug 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Ok TacoButtPlug

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

TacoButtPlug is right too.

[–] TacoButtPlug 2 points 11 months ago

You're alright, FARTYSHARTBLAST.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

I think that the impact is rather small. The major issue is actual usage; a dormant account won't tell the server "please fetch me those resources", or "please send this comment", or stuff like this, it'll be at most a new line in a user database.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

Don't stress about it. A few extra accounts won't make any difference. If 1000 people each make 1000 accounts, then you're starting to have a problem.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I imagine if it becomes an issue for the hosts of the account, they can just delete abandoned accounts, or accounts that havent interacted in some time.

I have an account in ml and another in lemmyworld. I like ml much more, but created the lemmyworld one when ml was having down times.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah, that seems like a good solution.

[–] UnRelatedBurner 5 points 11 months ago

what if I just seem like a throwaway?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

I don't think it'd cost the server much storage or computing power, but it would probably mess up an application queue. Also hopefully the instance does inactive account purges every so often.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Dormant accounts are dumb period, but that’s not going to stop anybody.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Not really inherently either, it depends on what you do with them IMO.