It's not an ad-blocker, it's a wide-spectrum content blocker which is necessary for security.

Well he's on Mastodon so I guess that's your answer.

Why would we attack the author? That seems like an oddly specific request that makes me oddly suspicious of the author, if anything.

It's pretty bad even in the context of British Colonialism and notably recent.

You've just reminded me of something that used to happen around 20 years ago on smaller forums which is "forum affiliates", where two or more forums with overlapping discussion interests would simply agree to link to each other to drive traffic.

I'm not sure how common that ever was or if it just happened with the types of forums I would visit, but it worked and there's nothing really similar in the Fediverse. Normally as a rule I tend towards the "stay separate" camp for communities - but something to boost visibility of related communities might at least help with the perceived drawbacks.

Thanks for your feedback, please follow my blog for more posts like this.

How can it be abused and to what end? You can go to any (instanceurl)/instances to see what it's federated to.

That's on them for hardly posting anything, they're getting plenty of engagement when they do.

I believe if the developer wants to make money from their apps, there’s noting wrong with it, as long as they are ethical.

Nothing wrong with making money from FOSS apps, even Richard Stallman wouldn't have a problem with that.

Lemmy has a much wider choice of instances, and extra features like microblogging never really appealed to me.

This sounds like it would be of particular interest to creeps and stalkers, I can't see how it would possibly be safe.

Finally! I have a lot of good will towards this project and understand there can be setbacks, but having been lead to believe that the Flathub version would be the flagship release channel, and then waiting for almost a month for the big new release without explanation of the delay it's not been a great look to be honest... hopefully they can seriously sort this out in future.

Crappy version of Mastodon.