| > most instances allow individual users to follow individual users on another "blocked" instance - its usually just promotion/sharing & discovery that are restricted. If they are still allowing access to all forms of third party content through their own instance (even if they restrict the discoverability) then they are still risking being held responsible for that content. So imho, that would be a mistake. Personally, if I were to host my own instance under such a protocol, I'd rather NOT allow any potentially illegal content that might come from an instance I don't trust to be distributed/hosted by my node. The problem, imho, is in the way the content needs to be cached/proxied through the node of the user in order for the user to be able to consume it. This is an issue in the design of how federation typically works. I'd rather favor a more decentralized approach that uses standards to ensure a user identity can carry over across different nodes of content providers, whether those nodes directly federate among themselves or not. There should be a separation between identity providers and content providers, in such a way that identity providers have freedom to access different content providers, and content providers can take care of moderation without necessarily having to worry about content from other content providers with maybe different moderation standards. I'm not saying ATProto is that solution... but it seems to me it's a step in the right direction, since they separate the "Personal Data Server" from the "Big Graph Services" that index the content. I can host my own personal single-user server without having all the baggage of federating all the content I want to consume. The protocol is better suited for that use case. In services using ActivityPub, instances are designed for hosting communities, they come with baggage that's overkill for a single-user service but that's still mandated due to how the communications work, they expect each instance to do its own indexing/discovery/proxying. So they are bound to be heavier and more troublesome to self-host, and at the same time, from what I've seen, the cross-instance mechanisms for aggregation in services like Mastodon are lacking. |