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.

...

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.

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

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.

Only if you use them to do shitty things.

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.

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.

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.

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.

what if I just seem like a throwaway?

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

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