Thank you for eloquently putting something that I have been struggling to put into words. I really hope that the big instances don't all end up moving to a whitelist federation model, the ability to have my own instance, with the ability to interact with any community in the fediverse, is what brought me here.

That said, a lot work needs to go into making this platform more resilient against spam bots. The biggest problem I see is that the default instance settings aren't resistant at all. It seems to me that it shouldn't even be possible to deploy a lemmy instance with no email verification, no captcha, and open sign-ups, but here we are.

Perhaps some sort of sanity check in lemmy that disables federation in that case might be a good idea. If someone is competent enough to implement their own spam protection beyond those, they're probably competent enough to fork lemmy and disable said sanity check

Reality really did take a strange turn back in 2020 didn't it? This decade just gets weirder and weirder.

I don't see an avatar for your user?

Regardless, I think it's a server problem, not a people choosing large avatars problem, I think they should be resized automatically.

I've sent you one of the worst instances (~10mb avatar), however i'm guessing you've resolved this since i'm no longer seeing the issue.