Okay, so how do you bootstrap a new server in that system?

What do you do when you just created a server and can’t get new users because you aren’t whitelisted yet?

But what if you do handful of users to start out, or just yourself? How do become ‘active’ without being able to federate with any other servers? Talk with yourself?

Obviously biased, but I’m really concerned this will lead to it becoming infeasible to self-host with working federation and result in further centralization of the network.

Mastodon has a ton more users and I’m not aware of that having to resort to IRC-style federation whitelists.

I’m wondering if this is just another instance of kbin/lemmy moderation tools being insufficient for the task and if that needs to be fixed before considering breaking federation for small/individual instances.