milicent_bystandr

what would happen to distribution X if Canonical suddeny made Ubuntu closed-source?

I believe Linux Mint has done some planning for if Ubuntu does something like that - probably to rebase off Debian in that case

I agree it would be a dangerous precedent.

Thing is, though, every instance is not equally valid and legitimate: that's the reason for defederating from Threads.

Not sure what you mean by what Gmail and Microsoft did to email? Do you mean that they assume many unknown email origins are spam? Though Gmail's obviously attracted a lot of users, and I myself have moved off it now to paying for my email provider elsewhere, I was under the impression it's been quite good for email and for pushing secure email, and being good at anti-spam.

I wonder if it's possible ...and not overly undesirable... to have your instance essentially put an import tax on other instances' votes. On the one hand, it's a dangerous direction for a free and equal internet; but on the other, it's a way of allowing access to dubious communities/instances, without giving them the power to overwhelm your users' feeds. Essentially, the user gets the content of the fediverse, primarily curated by the community of their own instance.