So here's the consensus:

For the time being, we had to switch from open registration to approval registration with email verification. 😭

We'd prefer an open registration system with more robust swatting away of spambots/scammers/whatever. There are technical ways of accomplishing that, but (1) time constraints, (2) none of us know Rust or the Lemmy codebase. Upon running the instance, we have come to understand that Lemmy's moderation/maintenance tools are pretty weak and only designed to react to bad posts/accounts on a 1-by-1 basis. So to keep the instance usable and friendly, we're just putting a speed bump in place for new accounts.

We will still approve basically all the ones we think are real people, but we wanted to keep spambots from being able to signup and post junk without us being able to react in time.

We do hope to return to open registration, perhaps either after Lemmy updates its moderation tools. We've also kicked around starting a kbin instance, since it has perhaps more development momentum. But don't worry, this Lemmy instance isn't going anywhere. And we will look at ways of resuming open registration if we can.