Open #Fediverse though / question.
On a thread about someone being brigaded here (and being able to use the tools available to shut out the bad actors and several of their servers, working as intended), it was mentioned by someone that it's relatively straightforward for bad actors who've had their servers banned to create new servers and start again.
To my knowledge, there is nothing really blocking that scenario. What are the options? Because the risk is that if it's as easy to set up a bad actor in Fedi as it is in, say, the email server ecosystem, then the long-term trend of this experiment is we end up where we are with email: a few big players with a heavy first-mover advantage because new nodes are assumed default-hostile, and it becomes nearly impossible to set up one's own independent node and have one's messages seen by people on the established servers.
@jonahstein That’s the best I can think of too. The issue is that I imagine a grim email-like future where the average case has become so untrustworthy that new instances start with a score of 0 and to be federated to, like, fosstodon.org or mastodon.social, you need a score of 2.0 or something. Experiments like this have a tendency to either fizzle out or become so big that they are targeted by malicious actors and have to bifurcate into “The world that regular people use” and “The busted, spam-filled, scam-filled world that the original protocol describes.”
Perhaps this future is unavoidable and the right solution is to get in on the ground floor with one’s own instance now if one wants to be part of the future trusted federated network.
IMO, this hole stupid metaverse thing distracted people from understanding that ActivityPub is essentially a protocol for communicating with a collection of namespaces.
Identity and/or Identity Management in the fediverse will become enormously important as it matures because that will become your defacto IDENTITY online.
The long term vision for UNSProject.com is to enable federated access management separately from federated identity management; users can "pin" accounts to their identity and they chose to amalgamate and share their reputation score to increase the trust in their accounts on individual instances (namespaces).
Users can also pin attributes (identity documents) to their account from 3rd party sites (banks, government sites, etc.) and share them when they need to prove this attribute for commercial/legal transactions)
Tons of nuance to doing this right, protect privacy, and avoid abuse; also a huge incentive for users to develop and protect their fediverse identities as personal brands.