For new instances, the easiest thing is to start with the list of an instance that the kind of moderation you agree with. If I were starting up an instance in the Lemmy world, I might go with the current federation list of lemmy.blahaj.zone or beehaw.org (although others might make differnet choices), in the Mastodon world I might use awoo.space as a starting point.

There's certainly a need for tools to make this more scalable. "Recommended lists" are a likely next step; there isn't much software support for this yet, but it's similar enough to blocklists that they're also fairly straightforward; it would be up to the new instance admin to decide how many to inspect or whether just to trust the list. And tools are also needed to address the challenge in the other direction: how do existing instances decide whether or not to accept the request? Instance catalogs like fediseer can help. Another possibility that I mention and link to in the article is "letters of introduction"; federations of instances (which I'll talk about in the next installment) are another.