That, at least, looks like it’s trying to be an information provider and you can choose what to do with that info.

And even that is fraught with risk, it’s challenging to do well and remain impartial.

Choosing to be authoritative about who can federate with who sounds a lot like email today.

It’s definitely something to be concerned about and fediseer seems to be trying to get ahead of the problem before the fediverse suffers the same fate as email.

panel of federated instances

Nope, can’t see anything going wrong with that idea.

The great thing about federation is any instance owner can already do this, you’re just asking to create an organization that decides who can federate. May as well be bluesky or reddit then.

At best you get a few major instances who together decide who can federate with them, and then those “major” instances lose traffic because people get annoyed with such nonsense and don’t federate with them, their traffic slowly decreases, and eventually they become irrelevant.

Worst case: reddit.

If a few instances decide to pull this nonsense, I’ll do all I can to avoid them. May make me setup my own just to ensure I don’t have to deal with such authoritarians.

I’m a technophile, been in IT 30+ years now, wrote my first programs in Fortran on punched cards.

I had these same questions, and had to search the web for them, as none of the instances I found had this info up front. Just a generic “create an account page”.

Lemmy suffers from the same issue lots if tech does - it’s driven by tech people, and we are notorious for assuming other people know what we know, plus, we’ll be damned if we’re gonna write any more effing documentation.

Ya want more people, gotta at least explain this stuff on the sign up page, hell, explain it everywhere…always have a link to “What in the world is this Lemmy thing?”