With the nonsense about gup.pe getting hijacked, honestly has me thinking again about secondary tools for the network...
Bright spot is that they probably can't imitate the server, as far as I understand it AP has keys for the servers to prevent that (which is also part of why you can't readily swap platforms, want to run something different you need to use a different domain).
Still, it has me thinking about maybe some secondary registry to track instance information. Maybe make these sort of events less disruptive.
This is entirely off the cuff idea, so think of this as spaghetti at the wall:
I was just imagining a signed file on servers that gave extended, non-platform specific, meta for the server, kinda like robots.txt.
I was just thinking information like:
* My IP is static, so if the IP changes without an updated signed file, then it's not safe (or it's dynamic, so don't worry if it changes)
* Remember my nameservers and do the same if the nameservers change
* Here's a moderator email for reporting posts (because the system mastodon has for sending reports to other servers is non-standard and not universal... I have to find moderator emails on about pages when I need to report something...)
* Maybe some tags if someone wants to make non-platform specific server directories
* Some flags like robots for nicer more compliant services, like bridges allowed/denied
And then maybe a dns middle-man service to toss on your server that checks these things periodically. So if something happens like with gup.pe there's a notice to admins and maybe it doesn't get cut off immediately, maybe letting admins give some final notices in more permanent situations.
