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I find it reasonably amusing that many people's solutions seem to be "just defederate bro". As in if this conversation isn't happening on an instance which chose to defederate and received thousands of negative comments, from other instances, about this choice. We're still being harassed by users, all over our instance, who are unhappy with this.
I also find it amusing that many people say the solution is to build your own solution. Do you not want the fediverse to grow? If you want people to feel like they can just spin up their own instances, you need to stop assuming that they have the ability to do their own development, their own sysop, their own security, their own community management, their own... everything. People are not omniscient and the outright hostility towards someone asking for help, or surfacing their opinion on the matter isn't helping.
Without adequate tools, I don't see how most instances aren't driven towards simply existing on their own. Large instances need tools to deal with malicious actors, as they are the targets. The solution to defederate ignores the ability for people to just spin up new instances, to hijack existing small instances with less resources for security, sysops, to watch/manage their DB, to prevent malicious actors. I've already seen proposed solutions which involve scraping for all instances with less than a certain number of users to defederate on principle (inactive, too many users/post ratio). We're fighting spam bots right now, who are targeting instances which don't have captcha enabled.
Follow this thinking through to it's conclusion. If the solution is to defederate, and there are potentially unlimited attack vectors, what must a large instance do to not overburden its resources? Switch from blacklist to whitelist? Defederate from all small instances? How is this sustainable for the fediverse? If you want people to be interacting with each other, you need to provide the tools for this to happen in the presence of malicious actors. You can't just assume these malicious actors won't exist, or will just overcome any and all obstacles you throw in their way because you're smart enough to understand how to bypass captcha or other issues.
This isn't just an issue of whether captcha or some other anti-spam measure is used, it's an issue about the overall health of the fediverse. Please think wider about the impact before offering your 2c about how captchas are worthless or how you hate cloudflare. I don't think the user that posted this cares about the soapbox you want to preach from- they're looking for solutions.