We don’t own shit, we don’t pay for infrastructure, we don’t deal with ddos attacks and database overloads, and reports and all the other shit that comes with running an instance.
What we have is the freedom to move. That’s it. If a given instance wants to experiment with democracy, that’s awesome! But lets be real, committees and large bodies move slow. You will eventually run into something that requires quick action, and it comes back to whoever pays the bills to do it.
In this case, we had an instance preparing to federate, and the announcement post made there was full of people specifically planning to fuck up every other instance. They didn’t hide it, it wasn’t hard to find, it wasn’t coded or otherwise obfuscated.
That is exactly time for a rapid, preemptive decision.
This situation is absolutely nothing like what happened on reddit.