@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.