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@Mathias Hellquist (Friendica) It's mostly people on large-enough Mastodon instances who barely (or not at all) know there's a Fediverse outside Mastodon who are in favour of a whitelist-only Fediverse.

A Fediverse that only works on whitelists would mean certain death not only to smaller instances and thereby to self-hosting your own private instance, but also to new instances in general and new projects. Developers who create new projects couldn't test-drive them with working federation unless their experimental test instance started out right away as a "lighthouse" instance with thousands of unique active users and 24/7 moderation.

In fact, entire projects would end up defederated because they don't have a single instance that's what the whitelisting crowd deems large enough. Hubzilla and (streams) could just as well remove ActivityPub support because all their instances are too small to be whitelisted; at least, it wouldn't matter anymore if their instances had ActivityPub on or not. Since Plume and WriteFreely would probably end up with not a single instance on the whitelists, and WordPress blogs don't count as Fediverse instances, the Mastodon-centric Fediverse would lose its long-form blogging capability.

But maybe that's what the whitelist supporters want. Maybe they want to make the Fediverse what they themselves have spent months believing what it is: only Mastodon.

@Tim Chambers @ophiocephalic @Spread Mastodon