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In a recent post, I made the case for why the Fediverse, with it's many thousands of instances would be impractical for billionaires to 'take down', in the same way that billionaires have successfully bought-out, or otherwise taken down other centralized social media/news platforms. This I think is true, in terms of the Fediverse's resiliency to the power of just money being thrown, but vulnerability remains. Specifically, I am concerned about recent government regulation that has already proven to be effective in closing down Fediverse instances and deterring others from even spinning up an instance.
I'm no legal professional, so excuse me if I say anything that is wrong or doesn't make sense. Anecdotally, I've seen a bunch of posts across the Fediverse about how they are closing down an instance thanks to the UK's Online Safety Act (2023). Similarly, it seems like the US bill (KOSA) could have similar effects? From what I understand, there is some new liability if your server hosts certain content and given how many Fediverse servers operate, caching content locally from other servers, there introduces a vulnerability by which a malicious actor could spam the Fediverse with something "bad"/illegal which would then be stored/cached across a large swath of the Fediverse which could expose these instance admins to legal liability.
Not good. And as someone who runs an instance themselves, I certainly don't want to open myself up to legal attack / prosecution just because some A-hole out there decides to spam me with illegal pictures or w/e.
So my question to the Fediverse, and to those that build the platforms we use here is, how can we re-architect the platforms and protocols to better protect ourselves? What do instance admins need to know about this threat? Someone smarter than me, please weigh in! 
@shellsharks The best and only way to combat this is to heavily promote single-user instances and, if that's unfeasible, promoting setting up a closed instance for your friends and family you trust. The big advantage of the #Fediverse is that instances can communicate; big public central instances weaken this advantage.
There should be easier out-of-the-box and cheap automatic set-up options to accompany that; something like NextcloudPi is for Nextcloud.
@lianna @shellsharks
unfortunately the fediverse architecture is not very great when it comes to single user instance, it causes limitations and ressource issues.
Small communities instances is indeed what maybe works the best.
@emon @shellsharks Yeah, I do agree unfortunately. I host my own #Friendica instance, but I practically require an account on another big instance for discovery purposes.
My global feed is only populated with accounts that users on my instance (aka me) already follow, so in order to populate my global feed, I need to follow people (that I find where exactly without a global feed?).
@lianna @emon I understand this. I have multiple Fedi presences. For multiple reasons. One thing I've maintained is a presence on the big big mastodon.social instance. I use it as my non-techie account but I also keep it because I have the best reach/discoverability (in terms of search) capability there.
And though I operate out of single-user instance now as my "main" Fedi presence, I was only able to do this effectively after gaining a relatively large (by Fedi standards) network of both accounts that follow me and accounts that I follow myself. Only then do I find that it's doable to have your own small instance, because otherwise it's hard to discover folks to follow and for folks to discover you. Now, I get tons of stuff boosted to me, and with any luck, I have enough people who will kindly boost something interesting I say.
@kinetix @lianna @shellsharks i use fakerelay, getmoarfediverse and fedifetcher to overcome single user instance issues but these tools twist the original idea of the fediverse of federated community bases instances (still it works great for m'y usage)
@emon@masto.top @lianna@mastodon.gamedev.place @shellsharks@malici.ous.computer I'm not sure how any of the tools that fix up and enhance the interconnections between instances are a negative. A lot of these 'issues' aren't even a thing outside of Mastodon. As an example, on Friendica, Pleroma/Akkoma or Misskey/Sharkey, you just add appropriate relays, and the instance software does as much as it can (with slight variations) on completing threads for it's users.
@kinetix @lianna @shellsharks
tools to increase instance interconnectivity isn't negative, it just is not very scalable.
For example 1000 users on a single instance performing a querry leads to 1000 querry in total.
1000 interconnected single user instances performing a querry leads to 1000x1000 querries because each istance needs to send the querry to every other.
That's why the chosing an instance does matter in the end, and mastodon is designed with local feed in mind.
@emon@masto.top @lianna@mastodon.gamedev.place @shellsharks@malici.ous.computer What queries are you referring to? I am not aware of any queries that an instance places on other instances. Instances ask for specific data, but it's not like a search happens beyond one's single instance. Are you able to clarify what you're suggesting?
@kinetix @lianna @shellsharks in this example, a querry could be an instance fetching status of another instance based on hashtag subscribed.
@emon@masto.top @lianna@mastodon.gamedev.place @shellsharks@malici.ous.computer Where is it suggested that instances query other instances for hashtags? I do not believe AP works this way at all.
I was referring to the tools I mention above (getmoarfediverse), it will querry instances you specify, for populating your own instance based on hastag you specify.
This is why I said it works but it's not reasonable to use it with millions of signle-user instance.
@emon@masto.top @lianna@mastodon.gamedev.place @shellsharks@malici.ous.computer OK, so you're talking about a tool that is not part of how instances function normally. That appears to be very non-scalable and even managing that tool would be a hassle for more than a handful of instances. Outside of the scope of this tool that is for a limited specific purpose and only for Mastodon instances, what are the scalability issues you were referring to?
@kinetix @lianna @shellsharks
I don't think I make myself clear.
I'm not saying mastodon, or the fediverse is not scalable.
I'm saying replacing every fediverse user by single-user instance would cause a much heavier trafic and load on servers.
This is because data is duplicated on every single instance that retrieves it.
@emon@masto.top @lianna@mastodon.gamedev.place @shellsharks@malici.ous.computer Some data is duplicated to some instances - data from a user to their followers (and sure, instance meta data etc), but this is not a linear scale just because 'number of instances'.
FWIW: The “global feed” on my (single-user) Friendica instance seem to contain all the public posts from all the instances my instance know of. I can see posts from lots of people I don’t follow, along the public posts of people that I do follow. It seems to work the same (though called “Known Network”) on my (also single-user) Akkoma instance.
As I follow 300+ people, from all kinds of other instances, on either of those instances I get a plethora of public feeds that end up in my global feed (or “known network”).
@m @shellsharks @emon How did you get that to work? My Friendica global feed is exclusively the people I follow. Not their known network.