this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Seems like manually approving new instances before they are allowed to push content to Kbin would be a good idea. Shouldn't gatekeep but blindly accepting them means playing an endless game of whack-a-mole.
i don't agree. I think it is important to maintain a blacklist instead of a whitelist where people would then submit what they need to add which will then will need to be approved etc. It will decrease the federated experience.
That only works if you have a group of responsive admins who can watch that for abuse. It really hasn't taken long for someone to figure out how to abuse that for spam.
I'm inclined to say I'm not a fan of my idea on a philosophical level, but we can't ignore the practical considerations here either. Endlessly banning spam instances is not going to be fun and takes away time and effort on the admin's part that could be better spent on useful things. A site clogged by spam is also not going to be useful, in which case it doesn't matter how well you adhered to your principles.
These interests are competing, but I think there's a compromise to be found. I'm going to suggest rate limiting for new instances until they've produced a certain amount of content (so say until they've produced X comments+links with a minimum Y days), plus a system that automagically puts new instances in the timeout box if enough users report their content. Admins can manually skip the warm up period for new instances, and also review the timeout box to see if it's actually a concern.
I think Lemmy may be doing something similar, actually. At least, I’ve noticed that smaller instances don’t seem to be federating nearly as well as larger instances. Obviously Mastodon have figured out a way around this as well, so it’s clearly doable.