From a technical standpoint, there is no real difference, it comes down to how the instance owner feels it’s best to run the server.

Ultimately, instances (or at least the ones most people want to join) want to keep rulebreakers, trolls and spam out. There are two main ways of doing this:

• Proactively: By attempting to prevent bad actors from signing up in the first place.
• Reactively: Allow everyone to sign up, and ban bad actors when they misbehave.

Of course, there is a lot of debate as to which of these methods are better (beehaw, for example, fundamentally doesn’t think a reactive approach can work at all), which causes tension between some instances.

This tension can rise to a point where one instance “defederates” from another, meaning they stop talking to each other and you can’t interact with one if you have an account with the other.

I will say, as I’ve grown older and more jaded, I’ve been finding the GPL more and more appealing…

Edit: Oh wow, why did a year old post show up at the top of “Hot”, sorry about bumping.

Out of interest, since Chromium is open source, is there anything stopping Opera, Edge, Brave, etc. just mantaining support for the old manifest? Like, I’m not sure why this is such a big deal for anything other than Chrome and Chromium.

Fun fact: If you google those codes you find out that they are “real” codes, but they don’t actually activate Windows. I think they are something that are used as placeholders in the upgrade from Windows 8 to 10 or something, but don’t know the specifics.

ChatGPT actually can’t create new “words”, just regurgitate words that it’s seen somewhere before!

Just a quick idea I had, and this may have been suggested before and maybe be untenable. But… Could communities be made invite/approval only as well as instances?

For example, on beehaw they want to ensure that everyone posting to their communities have been vetted in some way. So could have all the communities not allow posts by who haven’t agreed to beehaw’s “content policy”? Either by naturally having an account on beehaw, or by submitting a request to a moderator of the community.

Would allow people on other instances to see and follow those posts (but not post themselves, unless they go through beehaw’s approval process), and beehaw people to go and interact with other communities on other instances.