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Yeah, federation really is the killer feature for this compared to all of these centralized private services.

Sadly, I expect federation won't be foolproof/enough on its own. The fascists control more and more of the USA government. If/when they come after the fediverse it will be through whichever mechanism suffices to neuter it, including:

• A "great American firewall" to cut off instances hosted outside the country
• mandatory registration for any citizen leasing a domain name or a static IP address
• forced rootkits on all citizen devices

and all they'll have to say is "China/Russia/Europe/Iran/etc is infiltrating our glorious social media and making it unpatriotic" to justify it.

They don't really need to truly "kill" the fediverse, they just need to make using it enough of a pain in the ass and/or dangerous that not enough people use it for it to matter.

Anyways, the point of my comment is to encourage everyone who cares about this to try spending a little thought towards fail-safes for when federation won't be enough, and/or things we could be doing now to further protect our capacity to form these independent online communities.

If they do crack down on Reddit, it'll be one of the few opportunities we will have to "get ahead" on public sentiment and help people get accustomed to federated social media. Each additional person that is participating in the fediverse raises its resilience - from instance operating to moderation to sharing and cross posting.

Ideally we would see x new instances crop up for every y new participants. With a more reactive approach of spinning up instances as existing ones get taken down, I fear we would set ourselves up for a slow fragmentation into obscurity.