Indeed avoiding Cloudflare is the ethical thing to do. But I just wanted to point out that sh.itjust.works is a Cloudflare node, so I suggest choosing a different fedi instance.

I’m just planning to serve my instance with a onion address.

Did you ever go through with that? Cognitive dissonance would be triggered for me because lemy.lol is in Cloudflare’s walled-garden which is the world’s biggest adversary of the Tor community.

I think I have only encountered 1 onion lemmy instance so far.

You have to make and maintain one account for every interest you have?

Giving you wrote that 2 yrs ago, I guess by now you must know that you don’t need an acct on every node that carries communities of interest. Nothing about a balanced fedi forces you to maintain many accounts.

Nonetheless, it’s a good idea to have several accounts anyway, particularly for privacy. And also to not be blinded by fedi politics that creates bubbles. Maintaining multiple accounts is a burden but it’s only because we don’t have good client apps. A good app can make multiple accts seamless.

think instances should be bland an irrelevant.

Yikes. What a horrible way to organise communities. Two of the best known thematic instances are down right now: mander.xyz and slrpnk.net. People are feeling the loss precisely because of the loss of well organised communities.

I agree w/your underlying thesis – that having more thematic instances would improve the fedi. But it’s a bit of a false dichotomy to frame centralization as “not the problem”. Centralization is a problem of both power concentration and also fault tolerance (lemmy.world goes down and we lose half the fedi).

Having more thematic instances helps curb centralization. It’s part of the solution. We still need other mechanisms to create balance.

So if any instance becomes evil people just have to seamlessly move away.

The bad assumption here is that everyone knows about the wrongdoings of an admin. When the power is abused, the masses don’t know to move. The mastodon.social admins arbitrarily block whoever expresses a viewpoint they oppose. The thousands of users who that power affects are mostly unaware. The rest are too lazy to move.

The mastodon.social instance /is/ evil. Yet people have not moved away.

A smart attack would be coupled with a clear message. Have the malware clobber them with anti-evil messages and just like that you have a sound free speech defense.

Consider florida, where if you are caught with shrooms that are wet, freshly picked, they cannot convict you for carrying contraband because you do not necessarily know what you picked.

Laws are often based on intent. In some cases, penalties vary depending on intent. It would be an unacceptably brutally harsh law to judge someone under a presumption of harmful intent for something they might have no awareness of.

QR codes can have icons on them. Certainly if I created such a t-shirt, I would put some cool looking icon in the center of it. Someone being dragged through the system might argue “i did not know that qr code was real… i just liked the cat in the middle of it”.

“Malice” implies intent. Accidents are not malicious. Neglect in the worst case. So certainly any charges could not be based on malice.

Not sure but I think QR codes that hold wi-fi creds would more likely be automatically processed by phones. Seems like an adequate attack surface. Maybe dodgy creds could overflow or do some kind of DB attack. Or even legit creds could lead someone to connect to a malicious hot-spot captive portal that the attacker carries.