based on the list of instances made by @sunaurus@lemm.eehere - Thank you again for that work, it's highly appreciated.
This is a preventive measure against massive amounts of accounts being created for botting purposes. Most instances banned appear to be 1 user instances so we don't think this will have a great effect on anyone's usage of Beehaw. If you are an admin of one of those instances, feel free to contact us at support@beehaw.org
Maybe we should not federate by default but rather have admins send us an email to request federation, just like users have to send an email with a request to register?
Or not federate by default if the registration is open without requiring an email?
This would add friction since it would give lots of work for new instances. They'd need to manually ask federation with every other instance. Besides how would admins vet other instances?
An idea would be to allow any new instance to federate in one-direction mode (eg other instances' user can see public beehaw post). Then after a waiting period automatically move them to read-only bidirectional mode (users see other the other instance's posts, but can't post), then after another period move them to full read-write federation mode.
It would give time for admins to vet the instance during an observation/waiting period, and the level of trust would incrementally increase over time if no block/action is taken by admins.