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.

The blog post dives into how it's hard for spammers to automate adding themselves onto the whitelist because its a chain of trust. You have to have an existing instance owner to vouch for you, which they can revoke at any time. A spammer couldn't do things like run a "clean" instance, and then whitelist off that, because presumably someone would try to contact the owner of the presumed "clean" instance to get them to remove the spam. When they don't respond, or only partially address the issue, it's possible to pull rank and contact the person further up the chain of trust.

In short, it's real people talking to each other about spam issues, but in a way that scales so that an owner of one instance doesn't need to personally trust and know every other instance owner. It should allow for small single user instances to get set up about as easily as any other instance. Everyone has to know and talk to someone along the chain.

The real downside of the system is that people are human, and cliques are going to form that may defederate swathes of the fediverse from each other. I kinda think that's going to happen anyways though.

A chain of trust is the best proposal I've seen for addressing the scaling issues associated with the fediverse. I'm not associated with that guy at all, just saying I like his idea.

-- edit

On second thought, getting your instance added to the chain of trust is literally no more difficult than signing up for an instance with a questionnaire. It's basically that but at the instance level instead of the user level.

Couldn't agree more. I gatta say though I kinda find it funny that the pirate server is coming up with practical solutions for dealing with spam in the fediverse. I guess it shouldn't though, y'all have been dealing with this distributed trust thing for a while now eh?

It's been answered further below. Yeah it's that one bloke who did it at https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/db0 . The projects also open source though, so anyone can run their own Overseer Control server, with their own chain of trust whitelist. I suspect many whitelists will pop up as the fediverse evolves.

Thanks for the warning. Oracles got the worst reputation but I might have given em a shot if it cost me nothing.

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.

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.