If you want the instances to sync, you just need to sync the directory. (I currently use nextcloud sync for this, but in the past I used synching and before that btsync)

If they dont try to modify the files at the same time (with sync delay) there won’t be any issues. If they do grow out of sync, you can fix pretty easily with db repair.

the mastodon spam that’s mostly died down… we’ll see how that ends up. we saw similar things where admins got told to turn on approvals for all new accounts… which isn’t super scalable.

Anyway, Fediverse is finally important enough to send spam to, we’ll see how well devs can make solutions for spam on a federated platform.

But yeah generally agree, there’s no conspiracy here, it’s just fighting spam is hard… and having an account with X amount of Karma is hard for a bot to pull off (without leaving a really obvious paper trail of bots upvoting each other)