I have since learned that it doesn't access their onion service anyways, it apparently just goes back out to the clearweb

Using anything other than the official Tor Browser to access onion sites is sketchy and drastically reduces your anonymity (speaking as a former entry and exit node operator.) Is it open source?

I personally host my own instance, from which I interact with communities on many other instances.

This ensures my Lemmy account can't just be decimated because my admin decided to stop maintaining their instance and I avoid defederation that can block content I'm interested in (including the infighting among larger instances.)

I'm arguing the protocol was designed this way for a reason. Each instance is meant to be able to implement their own policies and defederate who they want, exactly what Beehaw is doing here. The idea that this is against the spirit of the protocol is entirely inaccurate. Hope that clears it up.

Even if the big players choose not to accept mail from us, we can accept mail from each other.

Yes, but my point was that those operators make up the vast majority of email accounts. Yes, all of your smaller servers can communicate with each other, but that doesn't matter when like 99.5% of the time, your target recipient will NOT be another small server.

Yes, email and ActivityPub are both decentralized, but that's about where the similarities end. Email, as a decentralized protocol, has been an abject failure. It is well known that big players DO actively block email from smaller servers often. Your individual experience is irrelevant. (For more details, see the thread at https://twitter.com/cfenollosa/status/1566484145446027265?lang=en)

The idea that email is "truly open" demonstrates a ton of ignorance on this topic. Email is entirely controlled by like less than 20 large operators, who often completely ignore email from smaller servers.

Email is literally one of the worst examples of an open protocol. The fact that this person thinks for a second it is even comparable to ActivityPub in terms of openness should completely undermine their credibility in your mind.

As much as I don't think the pact will do much, it's their right to defederate whichever instances they want. The protocol is still "open and interoperable" and this does not change that - in fact, this move is only possible because of that openness.

Your argument only sounds kinda sane when applied to Meta, but the same could be said about instances made by bad actors (spammers, for example). Please do further research before commenting on this.

I find it interesting that even the conservancy can't really say whether or not it's OK legally definitively. Here's hoping someone still takes them to court over this, wins, and sets precedence that it's a violation of the GPL (extremely unlikely, but a guy can dream)

I remember people talking about potential scenarios very similar to this when Red Hat was acquired. They were right.

We clearly have a disconnect here. There's a reason I always put a quote to act as summary in the description of my article posts, they provide more detail than the title could. At the end of the day, I think providing the original title regardless of its perceived quality is the better option when these posts are glorified links anyways. (I assure you it was not from AI, The Register has pretty high journalistic standards.)

least predatory 4chan user

When most people think of clickbait, there is a disconnect between the content presented and the title. There is no such disconnect in this case. Your interpretation of the word is an outlier, and even if I agreed that it was clickbait, you still haven't convinced me it is a bad thing in this specific scenario.

Yeah - even if it technically isn't legal, GPL violators have a long history of getting away with it. IBM has a legal team that'll scare almost anyone away.