@kumicota
Theres some stuff on mastos github somewhere for a whitelist mode. The intention is for universities or similar communities to control their own federation but many suspect it will be used by the major masto crowd. Gargamel knows this and fears it. I think he knows the damage it would do to those instances foolish enough to turn it on, but those admins dont care
@mister_monster @Drawfag @JoYo

@dielan
I was actually thinking about this, because I was looking at running a Pleroma instance that I do not want federated, I just want to use it for myself and some personal friends of mine to communicate. I was interested in the possibility of running an unfederated instance.

Is it so dangerous we shouldn't have the capability? That's a very tricky question.
@Drawfag @JoYo @kumicota

@mister_monster
I dont think the feature is inherently dangerous. Its just that there exists admins of instances with 4digit userbases (probably three digit when you exclude fake and derelict accounts) that wouldnt hesitate to turn it on and ruin their instances
@Drawfag @JoYo @kumicota

@kumicota
Yeah, so right now if you run a mastodon server it connects to existing ones by default, and you have to specify which other servers you want to block, this is called a blacklist.

Some people are talking about giving servers the option of a whitelist, which means the server won't connect to anything that isn't on that list. This means that federation is broken by default, because you have to explicitly say what servers you connect to. I hope it doesn't happen.