This isn't a correct answer to your question, that's why it's getting downvotes.

I mean they are two things that co-exist, it's not like they're in commercial competition. Flatpak itself is usually distributed as an RPM or deb.

It's so real that I had to enable 3rd party scripts in uBlock Origin to get past the second page, is that intentional?

No, if it was unlimited, I should be able to pipe /dev/urandom to it for fun if that's what I choose to do. What's this about "gluttony"? They sold the service as that.

Sure but Loch Ness is on the 3rd most populated island in the world, it's comprehensively explored, there's nothing newsworthy to say about it unless there was a vast oversight and that would be the head line, not the "monster".

It was ~20 years ago so my advice to myself then would be pretty irrelevant now. I messed up my laptop, and my advice then would have been don't start with a laptop (because laptop compatibility was lacking back then compared to desktop, different times).

Now you have me curious since this is the second language, why bacon?

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

The Sun is not exactly a reputable source for anything.

I think the answer is not yet, but unless you're some kind of fediverse celebrity it shouldn't be that burdensome, right?

I don't think that at all - a dozen or two replies to a topic is great because you can then reply to all of them on a personal level. That's how things were on forums in the old days. If you have hundreds of replies then there's the feeling of shouting in to the void, everyone competing for attention, that's where centralised social media platforms went wrong. On a decentralised platform we can take back the personal approach, that's what makes it better than Reddit - the danger is that it might get too centralised again and end up just as impersonal.

All this defederation drama reminds me of the old 90s/2000s forum days where communities where split into ever smaller groups over rather banal disagreements until you had like dozens of forums with ever smaller userbases and various grades of moderation policies and technical capabilities, often leading to complete data lass after some admins noticed that there’s actual work behind running internet services for lots of users. I worry the Fediverse is headed in a similar direction, though I hope I’m wrong.

You know, it reminds me of that as well but I have an opposite take. The forums I was most active on in the early 2000s were generally ones that had split from larger ones and had became smaller but much stronger and more personal communities as a result. You had the luxury of breaking off precisely because there was no expectation that one community would ever have a monopoly for a topic. Maybe my experience is unique, I don't know.

I can't speak for the specific situation here because I don't know anything about these instances. But the ability for people to split off after a terminal disagreement has generally struck me as a strong point to the voluntary federation we have.