I thought of this a number of months ago, and I wonder, if server softwares would be somehow able to stop fetching posts for a dead account that lingers (until they log in) it would probably save quite a bit of resources (disk/ram/cpu), and it would also probably help with reducing overall network load... It loads so many posts from people following users, and also related activities from friends of friends.....

Say, 50 people are on an instance, and they all follow 100 people avg., this would mean 5000 users are being followed on that instance. This is acceptable for a 5$ vps, but if it's something like mastodon.social, it's very bad.. The accounts aren't used for many years at times, yet the softwares all waste resources and fetch posts which might never be seen. If mastodon.social has 2 million users, and only 250 thousand are actually active, that results in 85% of users being dead accounts, and the entire idea of fedi is "host it yourself" so why shouldn't we lessen the cost and reduce the resource usage.. It wouldn't only be good for resources, it would also be good for network effects when a buggy post comes into play, crashing servers, or an exploit shows up--it won't be passed around as much..

I also wonder about domain greylisting for keeping spam away... Not that it would get rid of spam completely, but if an instance had a new peer that had never been seen before, it might make sense to put federating with them "on-hold" until it could be verified someway. I am thinking something like verifying that "friends" and maybe "friends of friends," on existing peers could be a verification source.. maybe a manual verification button could be used... Send a "federation request" maybe? Both toggleable, one or the other on, or both off or on...

If someone wanted to make a spam network, or spam instance, it may take a few days or a week or two to get through to someone.. A legitimate new instance might have to fight to federate.. but once they do, they would propagate more normally after 5-20 servers are connected due to network effects of friends of friends...

Not too sure about the greylist, maybe it could simply check the life of the instance *from* related servers or so... don't know.... I hope spam doesn't become a problem here... I'm thinking of ways to increase the difficulty of spam cannons federating widely... Increase the difficulty of servers being bad and they might waste time and money on domains and servers and setup for nothing.