Thanks for responding.

Of course these accounts gets banned quickly.

You only temporarily ban them from what I’ve seen in the modlog. You may not know this (I didn’t until recently), but a home-instance temp ban will override a remote instance perma ban (there’s a PR in the works to fix this , but it’s the way things are currently). And when someone has a username like https://lemmy.today/u/JewKiller64g, I really don’t think they’re going to suddenly change their ways in 30 days and come back after a temp ban a better person.

Getting a fake email address is really easy, so I don’t think it makes any difference whatsoever. On fastmail which im using, I can even create fake ones with a click on a button. It’s built into the service to have different emails for different sites.

It adds at least an extra step they’ll have to go through if they’re spinning up a new account to evade a ban. The one in question has admitted they’ll just keep spinning up new accounts because it’s easy. Adding a slight inconvenience won’t stop everyone, but it would at least help prevent becoming a base camp for trolls.

I think it’s frustrating for new users to have to wait for a random time period to get accepted, specially when it serves no purpose. I’m not going to be any wiser if I approve the registration now or 12 hours later.

That’s also 12 hours where your instance can spin up accounts with no one able to do anything about them and everyone else has to deal with that.

How do you know which accounts are spam accounts before they even started posting?

You don’t, but at least with some form of barrier they’re not free to go crazy with no oversight.

If the spammers and trolls manage to make you defederate from Lemmy.today, they will pick another instance.

You’re not wrong there, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. Right now, they’re targeting yours because there’s no barrier to entry whatsoever.

Sooner or later, small instances may even stop accepting new users for fear of being defederated from the larger network.

Not as long as the admin is responsive and takes measures to address the problems.

I would like to stop having these spam accounts and trolls on the instance. I could add email verification but it won’t make a difference and just make it more annoying for new users

Most instances require this, as do pretty much all mainstream platforms. I don’t think anyone is particularly annoyed by this.