Please. Captcha by default. Email domain filters. Auto-block federation from servers that don't respect. By default. Urgent.
And yes, to refute some comments, this publication is being upvoted by bots. A single computer was needed, not "thousands of dollars" spent.
It's probably the opposite. I'd say that right now, the incentives for a larger server with an actual active user base is to move to a whitelist only model, given the insane number or small servers with no activity but incredibly high account registrations happening right now. When the people controlling all of those bot accounts start flexing their muscle, and flooding the fediverse with spam it'll become clear that new and unproven servers have to be cut off. This post just straight up proves that. It's the most upvoted Lemmy post I've ever seen.
If I'm right, and the flood of spam commeth then a chain of trust is literally the only way a smaller instance will ever get to integrate with the wider ecosystem. Reaching out to someone and having to register to be included isn't too much of an ask for me. Hell, most instances require an email for a user account, and some even do the questionnaires.
When those "someone"s are reasonable, sure, it won't be bad, but when they're not? Give the power of federation to a few instances, and that's not just a possibility, but an inevitability.
We already know Meta is planning to add themselves to the Fediverse. Set down this path and the someone deciding who gets access and how will end up being Zuck, or someone like him. That sound like a good future to you?
Sorry for the late response, I fell asleep.
Yeah I'm concerned about that too. It really doesn't matter what anyone does if a group the size of Meta joins the fediverse though. They have tens of thousands of engineers working for them, and billions of users, they can do whatever the hell they want and it'll completely swamp anyone else's efforts.
Zuck wanting to embrace, extend, and extinguish the ActivityPub protocol is a separate issue though. The way a chain of trust works, when you grant trust to a third party, they can then extend trust to anyone they want. So for instance, if the root authority "A" grants trust to a second party "B", then "B" can grant trust to "C", "D", and "E". If "A" has a problem with the users of "E", the only recourse he has is to talk to "B" and try to get them to remove "E", or ban "B" through "E" altogether. I think we can both agree that the latter action is super drastic, it mirrors what Behaw did, and will piss a lot of people off.
So if you run that experiment, and any particular group can become a "root" set of authority for the network, I'd speculate that the most moderate administrators will likely end up being the most widely used over time. It's kinda playing out like that at a small scale right now with the Behaw/Lemmy.world split. Lemmy.world is becoming the larger instance, Behaws still there but just smaller and more moderated.
People can pick the whitelists they want to subscribe to. Who gets to participate in a network really just comes down to the values of the people running and participating in it. A chain of trust is just a way to scale people's values in a formal way.