Link: https://writer.oliphant.social/oliphant/pelago-the-old-man-the-sea-and-the-island

A very long text that comes two years after the proposal explaining how allowlist-based networks could work, why they are needed and all:

https://writer.oliphant.social/oliphant/islands

In short, it's not just about each instance having its own allowlist, it's about multiple instances in allowlist-mode creating a network with each other, all of them bidirectionally federating, based on commonly agreed rules. It's a way to favor a nice experience by default rather than the neverending task of getting harassed, moderating, etc...

Tools needed to be built. Shared reporting and actions, endorsements, dynamic additions/removal, shared spaces for communicating... This link explains it all and is an invitation for everyone to consider building such networks, small and large, closed or open

This is the end result of what I call the dark forest hypothesis of social networks or federated chat services that face similar issues.

Yes, you can frame it in a positive way, like the author does, but ultimately it is about hiding away from bad actors.

Personally, I think the lowest hanging fruit is open-registration servers, that like the article describes are a vector for abuse. That issue should really be solved first before discussing more closed off allow-list only networks.

There are levels to this. For sure, if we could automatically block instances with open signups and no manual verification, the worst of the worst would be eliminated and we could start with that. In fact I believe the author has a project of creating a larger-scale network of instances more or less like that, called Pangea.

The nice thing is that however strict you want to be, there's a chance the same tools will be needed anyway, up to you to configure, and this is what Pelago does. No matter what you do with it, it becomes more useful to everyone and I like that. Doing what you're proposing helps those with stricter rules and vice versa !

Is it right to understand it as a concept for next-level federation byusing shared and co-moderating whitelists?

Yes ! Instead of going in with no clue expecting everyone but a small minority to be nice, this is the part where we grow up, we know that many (most, in some cases) of the interactions will be bad, so 1) we're not naive and 2) we share information about that.

Activitypub is the technical federation, this is the social federation