I just figured out, that what small instances really need, is to decrease lifetime of statuses without interaction comming from really hyperactive domains, like eg. pubeurope.com
Without this, our database and media cache size is going to spiral out control.
This should work more or less like Watt's regulator of steam engine pressure: simple tool, auto-detecting domains flooding federated timeline. No need for domain bans, when the content is moatly harmless, but there is just too much of it.
The tootctl command line utility is much easier code to try some hacking, so modifying the "tootctl statuses" section doesn't seem so impossible, like hacking the Ruby on rails backend or React frontend. It is one simple SQL query.
But it would be nice, if moderators could fine-tune the lifetimes of statuse without interaction from individual instances, instead of full blocking.