Closing ActivityPub with the least effort
OCap is cool and all but 1. it's not recognized by wikipedia 2. it requires extensive changes to existing software and protocols. So, can we make something simpler?
I believe we can. Much simpler, in fact.
So, how can we prevent some groups but allow single-user instances and small instances to exist and join the fediverse without requesting approval from everyone else?
By putting an federation.txt on the domain somewhere.
This is a file that should be updated hourly from 2 other such (remote) files and a local file. For example, let's say awoo.space and sleeping.town have such a file. You put their file location on your config, add some instances of your own choosing to your local file, and publish the combination of the 3, after removing locally blocked instances from it.
This is very similar to what i2p does with the address list. It doesn't work on i2p, because that's a key-value map they're trying to merge. We're just merging lists (sets). So it should work much better.
Note that you aren't required to pull the list from big instances. You can, and should, grab it from smaller instances. You should also review your sources regularly and maybe change to different sources every now and then, after adding some of their entries to the local list.