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Other than playing whack a mole to block all the neo nazi and other hate filled instances, which are legion.



It's definitely a thing, but IME hosting a small instance, it's really not that bad. My advice for new admins would be to 1. find a small, decently up-to-date block list as a starting point (I can recommend FediNuke [0]), 2. check the #FediBlock hashtag (using any Mastodon UI or the RSS feed automatically generated) once a day or so for any warnings about bot attacks, or any other things you would like to be super proactive about, 3. promptly respond to the (likely very infrequent) reports you get from your users.

I could see why this might not scale as well to instances with thousands of users, or if a user is a frequent target of harassment (where opt-in federation might be the only solution), but for our lab, the existence of all the nazi or whatever instances has been resolved via a simple "Oh, these again. click, click, click There, the whole instance is banned." a few times a year. I have a suspicion that Dunbar's number or lower might be the optimal size for any federated social media instance, since knowing every user on my instance makes it a lot easier to tailor the little effort I have to put in.

[0] https://seirdy.one/posts/2023/05/02/fediverse-blocklists/


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