I've been wondering about this for the past week and given the trouble Lemmy users have had with the Nicole spam, would it make sense for large Lemmy instances to switch to a whitelist approach for federation?
Instead of automatically federating with every new instance, what if we set up a system where federation had to be requested and approved? New instances could submit a request to federate, and the panel of federated instances could evaluate it before accepting. Any instance added to the white list would ideally be whitelisted across participating instances.
It might help with moderation challenges, reduce spam and bad actors, and give communities more control over the content that appears. BUT it adds unnecessary friction and turns the Lemmyverse into a closed space which goes against the idea of federation.
Curious what other people think and how we can brainstorm an approach for this kind of moderation issue long term.
Edit: please do participate in this conversation instead of downvoting ?
Nope, can't see anything going wrong with that idea.
The great thing about federation is any instance owner can already do this, you're just asking to create an organization that decides who can federate. May as well be bluesky or reddit then.
At best you get a few major instances who together decide who can federate with them, and then those "major" instances lose traffic because people get annoyed with such nonsense and don't federate with them, their traffic slowly decreases, and eventually they become irrelevant.
Worst case: reddit.
If a few instances decide to pull this nonsense, I'll do all I can to avoid them. May make me setup my own just to ensure I don't have to deal with such authoritarians.
https://gui.fediseer.com/
That, at least, looks like it's trying to be an information provider and you can choose what to do with that info.
And even that is fraught with risk, it's challenging to do well and remain impartial.
Choosing to be authoritative about who can federate with who sounds a lot like email today.
It's definitely something to be concerned about and fediseer seems to be trying to get ahead of the problem before the fediverse suffers the same fate as email.
It is informative, but at some point if the top 30 instances decide to not federate with every new instance that top up, and rely on Fediseer to see whether new instances can be trustworthy or not, we wouldn't be that far from what OP describes, and based on the spam waves we've received lately, that would be understandable.