Strongly agreed. Lemmy needs to grow. I badly miss many smaller communities that are only viable with Reddit’s size. Making prominent instances invite only (or requiring approvals or closing sign ups entirely – as some other instances have done) is just going to hurt Lemmy as a whole.

Treating new accounts with a lot more scrutiny makes sense to me. We could require the first few comments to have mod approval to even show them (probably more of a per community setting since it would likely have to depend on community mods), restrict images for some period, have more aggressive content filters on young accounts, etc.