Fedibridge

Seems like it could help. https://gui.fediseer.com/ was already a step in this direction

panel of federated instances

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.

No. Limited access and restrictions should not be the default.

*Allow-list.

Maybe something like a time delay, or thresholds of some kind could be added into this equation?

Say, theoretically, everyone switches over to a verified whitelist model, instead of an automatic approval of any new instances.

Now, I don't think you're gonna get some kind of... UN of large instances to collectively do some kind of formal process that is shared between all members, and then somehow their collective decisions are binding for all members of this... instance UN.

But, individual instances could adopt and manage their own less permissive whitelist model, with their own vetting processes.

So an example could be:

Don't auto federate to every new instance.

Instead, wait for the instance to be... 2, 4, 6 weeks old, wait for it to have so many unique users, so many daily posts or comments in whatever timeframe... then when that threshold is passed, it gets auto whitelisted.

If a new instance owner wants to accelerate federation with your instance, new instance owner can send out some kind message describing their instance, overriding this process.

I am not 100% sure how the actual technical backend here works, how easy or difficult this would be to implement, how much workload this would put on instance admins.

If anything like this is possible, I really think you'd want to keep the 'sovereignty' of how the process would work still within the sole control of each instance, and not just... make a super-instance governing body that makes binding decisions for all accepted members.

That would be a mess, and would... just make the 'panel of big important instances' into basically the UN security council.

But at a per instance level, it doesn't seem unreasonable that individual instances could consider their own sets of federation criteria other than just 'automatically accept everything and only blacklist after massive drama or a botnet instance arises'.

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