going to slow growth no matter how you implement it.
First, slowing down growth != stopping growth.
Second, your idea of “growth” seems to imply that we should accept systemic disruptions to the people that are already here. To illustrate the point: assume that the reason that my instance got blocked is indeed because the IP got into some banlist. Through no fault of my own and no change of behavior on my side, I’m now locked out of the conversation with 50% of the Lemmy userbase. Do you think that’s it’s wise/reasonable?
Closing registrations to “spread the load” also comes with the assumption that server load from active users is a problem.
No, that’s not my point. My point is that if one server fucks up, the others don’t get locked out of communication with 50% of the userbase. Closing down registrations would reduce the split.
Think of it in this way… if lemmy.world has 50/60/70% of the userbase and if for some reason it gets disconnected from the fediverse, the admins can just shrug it off and say “oopsie, we will try to fix it whenever, in the meantime come and join us because it works here.” The minority gets screwed, but there is little incentive for the majority to care. On the other hand, if lemmy.world has “only” 15-30% of the userbase and there are other servers of similar size, if lemmy.world screws up, it will be in their interest to fix it.
Do you understand it now, and do you understand why me having to create an account here in order to be able to make myself heard is so disturbing?