[reginold]

Can you explain what "don't allow anyone to federate with the main instance" means in this case? Is it like you can host your own server, but the "index" of servers at lenny.ml won't list you unless you meet their standards?

Seems acceptable to me (anyone else can host their own index right?) just trying to understand.

[throwawaysea]

Yes it’s like that. Mastodon has the same thing going on, where the main index from their official site and the biggest instances won’t peer with you (let your users and theirs interact in each other’s instances) unless you implement their rules and moderation requirements in your instance. For mastodon what that means is that instances that aren’t progressive/far left aren’t welcome and are essentially not viable because they have no user base or network effects to seed their community with.

[stevenicr]

What does this look like to the average user?

I'm imagining - finding a topic or person or something that you want to follow, and then, your 'instance' / host pops up with "the thing you are trying to get data from is banned from this host".

Seems like an excellent opportunity to upsell someone to starting their own host / own rules system.. Star your own droplet for $10 a month maybe?

[throwawaysea]

Mastodon provides you with a 'federated timeline'. Basically your feed is a list of all posts the instance your account is on knows about, based on what the instance owners have configured. So you see all the posts directly from users in your instance, made on your instance, and also posts from other users in your subset of the fediverse, determined by what other instances your instance peers with. You can interact with users from other instances by referencing their handle and instance. So instead of @bob it would be more like @bob@xyz where xyz is the instance. You can follow a user from a different instance. Oddly, even though you can filter your federated timeline to your local instance, you cannot filter it to any other specific instance - for that you would need to create an account on that instance and view its local timeline. So basically it gives you a broader audience and user community than just your specific instance.

Some useful links that explain it further:

https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/7/15183128/mastodon-open-sou...

https://kevq.uk/how-does-mastodon-work/

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/network/

[reginold]

Fascinating. Well that clearly doesn't work. It's almost like having an index at all forces a ranking or framing. And so perhaps the index itself is what needs to go.