@strypey

> maybe that call to action and others like it played a part in moving from almost all fediverse services being open registration, to;

I watched it happen; FediList was active by the time that shift started. The two things it coincided with were the wider availability of admin-approval and the spam problem. A call-to-action is scoldy, and people don't go looking for solutions to hypotheticals: half the time people are glad just to be able to get it working. I was half-drunk when I set up FSE, expecting it not to work on the first try, because of all the difficulty people reported. But if the solution is available when people experience a problem, then you get buy-in. Most problems are fake.

> It just wouldn't have happened without discussions to a) create the option, and b) encourage its use.

I think writing the option in created the option, and the encouragement was spam. What the fretting over danger has done is scare people into not doing it. I have complained a lot about trouble you run into running a server, and people have told me that this sort of problem is why they don't run their own instance. I mean, I'm fascinated by the sort of weird shit you run into and I don't want to give people the impression that it's different than it is, so I'd rather not filter, but these are real problems I encounter, but people that have the problem that looks like it's near what I'm posting about, they ping me. And really, which is worse: ambient spam, or fewer people running servers? Look what happened to email: nobody runs their own server, Google owns email now. This is fucked up. "You had better $x, you'd better do $y, everyone that doesn't disable $z is cancelled." is poisonous. "I'm happy to help if you run a server" has gotten more machines stood up than any "Look at all the problems!" post, and people knowing who to ask when they have a problem mitigates more problems.

I think that fixes and prevents more problems: make sure you hit the problem first so that you know what to tell people that run into it and you're available to people that want help.