@Gargron That's up to the admin to decide. They don't have to approve every request, but being able to quickly approve a request by a familiar email/user is the primary goal of this feature.
@pixelfed@Gargron this solves the problem of if you invite your friends to your instance and your mail server randomly stops working it's easier to just approve them anyway
Gregory's Server
@Gargron @pixelfed probably something like "hey is this ur account? someone requested a manual verification"