Yeah, that helps. And trust lists would take some of the burden off node operators. But it’s all the more important that the node does some cleanup automatically if satellites are removed from trust lists, because they won’t be aware if and when this happens. Perhaps after a 7 day delay or something, as I can understand you want to protect against accidental removal.
There is also some risk to satellite operators with this approach, as they can become completely reliant of these trust lists if there is a single or a few popular ones. Being removed from the most popular trust lists could instantly kill a satellite as they lose almost all their nodes.
Given that you’ve confirmed the new list is indeed going to be a bit of a wild west, I urge you to alter this request.
At this point, without the proper tools available, it really doesn’t seem wise to use your production node to join this test. Instead the request should be to spin up a separate node for this test to limit the impact on good functioning nodes. If aim going to join in on this, that’s what I’ll be doing for sure. Otherwise node operators might end up with data from defunct satellites taking up space, many trust errors in the logs and no easy way to clean that mess up. This isn’t production ready in this phase, which is fine, but it then shouldn’t be run on production nodes.
This actually mirrors advise for testnet nodes mentioned here: Stefan Testnet Satellite