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.
Depending on implementation, the lookup should be indexed so the time difference would be very minimal on even large tables.
The cutest of storage could be a problem depending on how many wasted accounts exist, but even that should require a ton of accounts to make an impact.
Yeah, there’s always room for a lot of implementation-dependent possibilities of good DB practices, but it’s also possible for one mistaken PR approval to create exponential load.
In the case of FOSS where there might be fewer formal processes to catch errors, I like to err more heavily on the side of caution. If for no other reason than preventing surprise server scaling bills for the volunteer admins.
Also: if you are making throwaways, please consider donating time and/or cash to those instances.