That's a good point about the user authentication, but I'm not quite sure we'd need it quite yet to reduce spam in this way. It is absolutely something to keep in mind though.
I think the other instances allowing federation in the first place grants "I trust the owner to not impersonate users" part of the chain. In Reddit there's that trust too, the whole "I trust the admins to NOT edit my comments silently at the database level"...
Their biggest complaint was something I found odd as a new user to the fediverse too. When I was looking for a home instance, I saw that beehaw required an application, but I could just create an account elsewhere and interact that way, skipping it.
It seems like (at least one of) the tools they want is to allow federation to other instances, but external accounts must still "apply" before being able to comment or post. That'd allow users on both instances to still view each other's content, but it's not as cut-and-dry as blocking all posts from external accounts like limiting would (if implemented) or worse, defederating and siloing from all.
Yeah, this is specifically on sh.itjust.works for those viewing this thread elsewhere, but I'm sure other instances are struggling too. I'm not even seeing 500s, just a generic Firefox "Cannot complete request" on mobile and connection resets on Jerboa.
Edit: ah, yep, here come the 500s mixed in there as well.
I use Fedora Kinoite for my non-nvidia laptop, and uBlue's nvidia Kinoite image for my desktop. I switched after I got my Steam Deck and found I just really liked the idea of an immutable OS with KDE.
I guess that also means I use SteamOS 3 too!
I've been absolutely slamming Persona 5 Royal. I've ran into a couple odd hard freezes with the game, but I'm about 60 hours in at this point so it clearly hasn't stopped me.
Would absolutely recommend!