The @pixelfed Curated Onboarding feature is the perfect balance between closed and open registration.
Not only can you more easily vet applications, but we also support email notifications to admins when they successfully verify their account.
If you want to request more info, simply use the default message template, or define your own to reuse, and your request for addl info will be sent to the applicant with a magic link they can use to respond with.
Pretty cool eh!
https://pixelfed.blog/p/2024/feature/introducing-curated-onboarding