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 ?
I think something like this will become more necessary as spam becomes a larger problem. This is why I started the fediseer in the first place. The fediverse/apub model is very prone to abuse by spammers who exploit its open nature. The point of using the fediseer already now, is that when the problem becomes impossible to ignore, we already have a service set to combat it populated with the relevant info.
Relevant as well
It will probably happen. Having to ban waves of spam accounts every week isn't sustainable.
Sadly way too many admins and developers are content to ignore this problem, until it's too much to ignore. And at that point, the solutions need to already exist. More specifically I wish more admins would actively curate the fediseer and help with improving its automation toolset. Sadly it's still just me.
😔