Hello guys! New here. I'm coming in peace from a friendly polish instance - fedit.pl. Actually I was contacted by Alice (I believe?) on one of subreddits, had a very nice chat and figured that this instance has to be quite cool. A question for starters - you are not federated - why? If you don't want to federate with all that crap out there, you can just put a few friendly instances on your whitelist in admin options (assuming they also have only friendly whitelisted instances).
Absolutely, I agree. Rn I'm federated (with a long blacklist of instances from fediseer), but honestly I don't have enough people on board that it makes any difference. I'm in the process of figuring out how to attract users. I managed to plug in fedi-safety which has the ability to run through all images in db to search for adult content and as well it can do i in real time during posting, but in this case it demands that your PC with GPU is constantly running which is not very convenient. But it's there in case I suddenly needed to use it.
My instance is 4 weeks old and I've been spending quite some time on it on a daily basis. I think it could actually be better to have a whitelist of trusted instances than having to constantly be on alert because some new instance is not on your blacklist. For sure, we could do that. We just whitelist each other. You probably won't download content from my site, cause it's all in polish and for the most part I want it to stay that way, but polish people know english pretty well and like to participate in discussion in english from what I see on reddit.
Have you checked other niche instances that could possible also be a part of such an "alliance"? I was only a few times on those big instances and there is too much bs there for me tbh.