Cliff and his co-admin Kyle Reddoch are now working on their own alternative index, that doesn’t include this requirement. It’s a massive undertaking, and requires vetting communities asking permission for inclusion, and regularly checking in on community developments. Still, they’re optimistic.
“[We] are making a list on our Wiki of instance that both federate and defederate from Threads,” Kyle writes, “we feel people [should] have the choice themselves and not have someone else choose for them.”
I kind of think that it'd be nice if there were support for various instances claiming that they support various collections of policies, as it'd be an easier way to identify how instances work and choosing one.
Like, right now it involves manually reading through each instance's sidebar, but if it were published in a standard way, it could be used to filter instances on lemmyverse.net, to help a user find an instance that they like.
And one instance could commit to multiple sets of (compatible) policies, doesn't need to be just one.
From a user standpoint, when the first step in entering the Threadiverse is a huge number of instances and manually reading through lots of individual instance policies, that can be a bit overwhelming.