I’m not convinced there’s a winning route once they’re in. But, maybe I’m just the pessimist.

Neither am I. But universal pre-emptive defederation just cuts to the end game without any kind of fight. Meta users won't even notice if/when they defederate because they never knew about us in the first place. And defederated instances will lose users to Meta because some people use social media in ways that only work well with bigger networks.

I'm all for some instances saying they want their networks to stay small and users who prefer it that way should have somewhere to go. But users who want a bigger network should have better options than signing up with Meta.

The only way they co-opt the existing userbase is if everyone defederates from them and people who need/want a bigger network have no option but to move to Threads. This is what happened to XMPP and we risk doing it to ourselves this time around.

I'm not saying no instance should defederate. There are good reasons to avoid them. But if there are no independent instances federated with them, Meta dominates the space by default and without anywhere else for its users to go (unless they want a smaller network and know about the existence of defederated instances).

Are you trying to pretend the power relations were in favour of the driver here?

Get a grip.

I did watch the video. He was having a bad day. And the wealthy person he took it out on took it upon themselves to dismantle his life. That's the whole point of being wealthy, after all. You don't have to give a shit about anyone but yourself. And there will be ordinary Joes cheering you on because this world is absolutely fucked.

And for people that want the fediverse to stay small, that would be fine. For those coming from very large sites like Twitter or Reddit, it often will not be because the value of those sites comes from the size of their networks.

It won't kill the fediverse but it might kill the various dying-mega-site migrations. For some that will be welcome. For others, not so much.

There isn't a one-size fits all here. The biggest danger is the fediverse devolving into a paranoid war of words solely because some people think there should be.

More sense than what? No one's claimed they learned it from us and we've only just found out about it, so we didn't learn it from them.

It isn't really nature vs nurture, it's nature interacting with nurture. Steve Jones, the biologist explained it beautifully with reference to Siamese cats:

Siamese cats are light brown with dark brown fur at the tips of their ears, feet and tail. But if you raise one in a very warm environment, they will be light brown all over. A very cold environment, they will be dark brown all over. There's a gene switching the fur colour but its action depends on the temperature.

There are many different ways genes and environment interact, there's no real 'argument' here. It is simply true and, because genes and environment are often so closely linked, it's often complicated and sometimes impossible to tease out what's causing what.

I might. But ferry companies are not generally allowed to.

You wouldn't stop to think about it. But how is it even possible for a 7 year old to fall overboard in the first place? Ferries are full of kids running around, something must have been very wrong for this to happen at all?

If you must post reddit content, post a screenshot. No need to send traffic their way.

WTF?

It's a lot more practical? Cheap to build and minimal footprint on the ground so existing buildings can stay put.