> the bizarre decision to make federation whitelist based.
Given the multiple articles I've seen on how federation can easily accidentally DDOS mastodon servers, which isn't even a form of federation that primarily uses something as heavy in data usage as video, I do not find that so strange tbh. And that's before factoring in malicious actors or even just careless ones like all the AI scrapers.
IMHO based on my use of the fediverse, fundamentally it's about porn and curtailing unwanted porn in your domain. I'm a user of mastodon.social in the "wee US hours" (before US mods are awake) and run across a lot of hit-and-run porn being pushed to Trending (and I report, etc.).
It's a thing, it happens a lot and Lemmy instances have the same problems to fight. Unwanted porn in my eyeballs is sadly a not uncommon experience until you've put in effort to set up blocks and filters on your personal accounts. Peertube being explicitly video based is a natural target for porn pushers.
Given the multiple articles I've seen on how federation can easily accidentally DDOS mastodon servers, which isn't even a form of federation that primarily uses something as heavy in data usage as video, I do not find that so strange tbh. And that's before factoring in malicious actors or even just careless ones like all the AI scrapers.