I want to say that I saw a post at some point about one of the popular instances (was it beehaw or lemmy.world?) not requiring users to answer a challenge question during signup. Does it seem like email verification is sufficient to mitigate bots or does a challenge question help too, do you think? Sopuli required both. Unverified users can apparently post?
Just noticed Zig with the 2023 StackOverflow survey. Stood out as a language people seemed to be happy with, and paid a lot. I tried elixir for a day and, like you, it wasn’t my thing. For what it’s worth (less than the cost of the electricity used in the process of posting my comment), I say maybe try Zig