> the bizarre decision to make federation whitelist based.

Given the multiple articles I've seen on how federation can easily accidentally DDOS mastodon servers, which isn't even a form of federation that primarily uses something as heavy in data usage as video, I do not find that so strange tbh. And that's before factoring in malicious actors or even just careless ones like all the AI scrapers.

I can see that's probably the logic behind it, but when your biggest USP is federation it still seems like a bad idea to deliberately hobble it.