No, the idea is that you block entire instances where the admins are lax about allowing spam or bot accounts.

If you run an instance and don't do active moderation and just let any putz sign up and post crap, you'll end up getting de-federated and your real users will probably leave (Masto makes it easy to migrate your stuff from one account to another).

This is one of the reasons why having lots of instances is a good thing, and one of the risks of Mastodon's federated structure is having a lot of users sign up to one or two big generic instances.

I'm hoping that more sites that have existing user communities will start offering Mastodon instances for their already-vetted users. The instance I use (SDF.org) is largely but not exclusively for existing SDF members, and this seems to work quite well. I don't know how the mainline Mastodon server's authentication system works, but hopefully it's reasonably straightforward to plug into an already-existing user database for auth purposes.

> Masto makes it easy to migrate your stuff from one account to another

People keep saying this but it barely moves anything across lmao. Followers and some profile data? That ain't a migration.

Server admins block other servers that do not effectively prevent the creation of spam accounts. Could this become a problem if the network grows fast enough to be a profitable target for spammers? Probably. Is it a problem now? Not that I've seen.

On Mastodon there's a setting "Require follow requests : Manually control who can follow you by approving follow requests" so you get to whitelist Real People.

Not as onerous as you suggest.

Block each of a million individual spam bots manually. I'll wait.

Between junk filters and blacklists, I rarely see email spam these days. That doesn't make me feel closed off.

We've had 40+ years to develop spam blocking techniques for email, hopefully it won't take that long for Mastodon.