Imagining for a second that I had the technical ability to do so. The thought of running a lemmy server and letting random people make accounts sounds scary to me. Especially a "general purpose" one. I would feel responsible for the crappy stuff posted by users. How do people cope with that.

Also would not be able to conduct the "investigations" required to determine if an instance was csam etc. Because that means you have to go and check it out! we can't have a system where every admin is basically required to view CSAM. that's crazy.

Fediblockhole does something along those lines for on Mastodon ... not sure if there's an equivlaent in the Lemmy world.

From previous interactions with the author, I am convinced he is not really interested in the growth of the fediverse and is more than willing to sacrifice anything if it keeps it small and on the fringes. As much as I try to steelman his arguments, I can not find a good reasoning. At best, it is just a reactionary attempt to keep the fediverse exclusive to some minority. At worst, it becomes a way to submit everyone into a ESG-compliance racket. "Nice instance you have over there, it would be a shame if it was marked as the home of nazis..."

Who is the judge of these blocklists?

The Ministry of Truth, of course.

global blocklists

good thing nobody suggested that..... And if they did it would be completely unenforceable.

Nonsense. Instance blocklists are used across the fediverse today. They're certainly not a perfect solution but they have the advantage of actually existing. See Blocklists in the fediverse for a lot more discussion.

You can immediately see who is an admin and who is not.

If you have an open instance and someone puts csam on it and reports you, you’re toast. Thats what blocklists are for and they arent new. Mastodon instances already have blocklists which every sane admin uses. They even come in different flavors.

The way this works is that certain instances „vote“ on blocks by applying blocks to certain instances and if one, multiple or all „trusted“ insrances block an address, it „federates“ through these updated lists.

Yes, at least on Lemmy. It's the icon with two boxes.

Great point. I'm revising it, and added a section on "Some hard problems – and some intriguing ideas" including

Consent-based federation is another area where today's tools leave plenty of room for improvement. Today's approaches to allow-list federation are very manual and cumbersome; how to make it work at "fediverse scale"? There are some tricky questions here, for example how to make sure that small and single-user instances don't get frozen out. There are intriguing ideas for other approaches ...