Ryan started A New Social https://www.anew.social/ that seems to aim at exactly this. So, maybe you could reach out and see if you could help there?

Interesting. I’ve just read about https://se-bridge.org/ the other day. Maybe you can join forces or collab or just learn from each other.

I’d like to add from a user’s point of view. Firefish.social was advertised as the flagship instance and in the beginning everything was fine and nice on there but then they started to implement new stuff and this broke something leading to the flagship instance being down or unusable for most of the time. Days turned into weeks with the server not running or at least not without problems (only talking about timelines, not to mention other features like antennae or lists which wouldn’t work at all) without any communication from the admins and no replies to direct inquiries. I eventually moved to another instance running a stable firefish version. But our admin also complains about being ignored by the dev team, so they decided we will be moving to Sharkey. And we all know that Kainoa is young, started uni last year and a new job - that’s all fine and understandable but maybe not compatible with running such a big project. Which again is fine but also means that -for now- the project is not being worked on while in a broken state. I think this is valuable information for users and admins and it was good to hear this from someone in the core team.

This mole was best at hide&seek for so long…

Thanks, enlightening text. I think, the biggest problems w/ blocklists are “guilt by association” (you lose all your connections because someone on your server was being problematic - I feel oftentimes account-based blocking should be the first choice) and these lists being created and maintained by a small group of people who are all more or less friends. On the other hand - as you pointed out - for now, they seem the most feasible option to provide at least some kind of protection. Not sure, if there will ever be a solution that fits all. Probably not.

New to Lemmy and not a huge reddit user in the past and to me both are exactly the same amount of confusing (i.e. a bit).