this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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Right, an instance owner has to endorse another on an ongoing basis though. So for example, if an instance owner named Bob initially trusts a spammer based on a questionnaire, and then that guy immediately generates 100 bot accounts to start spamming with, then Bob can revoke the trust and the spammers instances get defederated.
You also need to own a domain to run a Lemmy instance. The cheapest of which are only a few dollars a year, which isn't much but it does put at least some floor on peoples ability to generate instances that'll just get banned.
Could it be a subdomain, though? What if a spammer started a "Lemmy instance as a service" on "legit.ml", and started creating instances on "lemmy.u.legit.ml"? What if some of the instances were actually legitimate, while thousands of others weren't? What if... oh well, the rabbit hole goes deep on this one.