Yes, i hate this in these kinds of discussions. It so often devolves into how you'll be safe from surveillance by world governments (spoiler: you won't be, if they really care).
And here I am, just not wanting to hand data over to giant corporations that have been proven to use it for no good.
Heck, even if there was no good actor/solution, not giving all your data to the same bad actor is already a step up.
Actually anyone can post using the API, and many people did. Lots of the heavily publicized posts were written by humans
It's one of those things where as a tourist, you're completely fine and don't really notice the racism. And you probably won't get assaulted because of your race.
But the foreign sounding last name on your CV halves your chance of getting hired, servers at a restaurant will address your white friends first when taking an order, your chance of getting the apartment you applied for is lower (unless it's in the one part of town where all the foreigners live, since they don't get white applicants) etc. And a lot of europeans are completely oblivious to this.
And you still have police shooting unarmed black people, that kind of stuff, it's just way less prevalent and the media does not talk about it and there's no huge protests.
Yes it's a pretty short list and with some caveats. Actually I almost didn't double check when reading your message, as "only the US and some dictatorship" (e.g. use of metric system) is usually how these things go, but I was curious and found the wiki page.
I watched that like 8 times over the course of summer holiday as a teen.
My parents were on vacation, I'd borrowed it from the library and every time some friends visited, they saw the dvd and went "oh lets watch pulp fiction!".
It does lose some of it's appeal around viewing 5, but still enjoyable. But me and my one friend who was there often could almost act the whole movie by the end, so that was fun.
heck if anything, the Fediverse, as it is right now, is more susceptible to this. You can spin up spam instances on new domains, with spam users, and have them federate to existing instances, faster than volunteer run instances can ban/defederate.
So you end up with not federating by default, but having some trusted web of instances that federate and maybe an approval process for new instances to federate with? But that'll still lead to centralization with "trusted" instances and new instances having a hard time to join the club (there's also the scaling problem of the fediverse, but that's besides the point). So you end up with a few very big instances and the owners of those instances having all the power. Or maybe small isolated islands of mutually trusting instances? Still better than tech oligopoly, but also a far cry from the original dream.
I feel Authentik is at the sweet spot between complexity/features (keycloak) and ease of setup (authelia)
Yes. And that requires the participants to self-regulate and be educated, at least beyond a certain number of participants (and this number is more in the 100's than 1000's of devices in a city size area).
In case anyone is interested, in meshtastic, for a regular handheld device, set it to client if in a less populated area, client_mute in densely populated areas. router/repeater only for really well positioned nodes (think top of a mountain, NOT top of a tall building), router_late for ok positioned nodes where there's other, better router nodes around, but they can cover some dead zone that the better router ones don't cover. And then there's other like client_base for e.g. a rooftop node to help handheld devices inside the house reach outside. And follow the guidelines of your local area group/forum/whatever on number of hops, band to use etc.
None of that is really complicated, but a lot of users will just buy a device, turn it on excitedly with default settings, see that messaging works and not dig deeper, and then worsen then network for everyone.
With meshcore, there's a repeater firmware and a client firmware, it's not just a setting that can be selected in the app. Default is client, and switching to repeater mean reflashing the firmware. And more clients don't really matter for the network, since they don't repeat. So much less risk of an unwitting user worsening the network.
And if anyone wants to play with this, all the devices should support both meshtastic and meshcore firmware, so you can play with both and see which you prefer.
And if you're curious why I prefer meshcore, these are all the nodes I was able to hear on meshtastic and meshcore, respectively, in the same location, with meshcore I can reach twice as far in each direction 
I'm definitely not an expert radio operator or anything, but this is how I understood it.
With Meshtastic, no, it actually gets worse beyond a certain point, especially in dense areas. Each radio rebroadcasts messages, so more message fill the air, causing more congestion. setting devices to client_mute (no rebroadcasting of messages) alleviates this to some extent, but most people don't do that. In general, a few well placed nodes are better than a lot of clients.
Meshcore with dedicated Repeater nodes alleviates that a bit, as a node is either a client that can originate messages, or a Repeater that can only rebroadcast. And it has a bit better routing protocol, reducing unnecessary duplicates in some cases.
The radio band is license free in many countries, but there's still some restriction, e.g. 10% duty cycle in my country, which means no radio can be sending more than 10% of the time (so 1 minute in every 10 minute window). That combined with (afaik) nodes only being able so send one message at a time limits how many messages can be in flight at an instant. And more clients increases background chatter from e.g. node announcements and duplicates, leading to further congestion. And in meshtastic, since packets "flood" out in all directions, and each node rebroadcasts again, and it's not directional, all the packets travel all over the place when you send a message. You could have a packet traveling in circles between new nodes for a long time.
E.g. in my region, originally the default for meshtastic was 7 hops on long range fast preset. That led to congestion so they switched to medium range fast, then recommended limiting hops to 5, and now ideally to 3, just so there's less chatter and less utilisation of the channel. 3 hops is barely enough for me to get out of the city I live in. Meshcore also does floods, but also can keep track of paths so you can have a relayed connection along a specific path that does not flood out in all directions, along with putting up repeaters being a conscious and strategic choice by users, so you get something more like a dedicated highway of repeaters that are placed high up and can relay messages much better than some client down at street level could. And the hop limit is more like 64 (I think it can be higher but that's what is set somewhere in the firmware). And repeaters are stationary, so they don't need to announce themselves to the network that often (e.g. every 3 hours in meshtastic vs every 24-48 hours in mesh core). All of that means less channel utilization and longer reach.
I've just finished reading a very detailed book on 13-16 century renaissance history and yes, always fucked. Though less dark ages than you'd think and more fucked politics, same as now.
Plus we only really know the history of rich people up until very recently, so no telling how fucked the poors were.