You can relicense code. Though that doesn’t mean that you can take anything away. You just open another avenue for people to use what you wrote and developed, and any old license still exists and retains validity; the way you can curtail rights is by not granting liberal terms on newly created code.
This is how macOS switched to zsh, and left all GNU code in it to rot.
I open new browser tabs and type into a pastebin.
Pastery going login-only majorly screwed me over; now I use GitHub gists.
Anti-abuse measures such as this are generally designed to not provide that kind of feedback. The website developer is modeled to be an adversary, and you don’t volunteer valuable information on what has worked against your countermeasures, and what hasn’t, to your designated enemy.
Where is this? Düsseldorf Central Station?
In the specific case of Mastodon, an instance pretty much only receives a post via federation if one of its users either follows the creator of that post, or is mentioned in it.
Discoverability suffers, because this also applies to replies to a post even if you follow its poster. You might see them, or you might not. You look at the post history of one of the users in a thread and it comes up empty.
This is not much of a problem if you’re in one of the, say, top five instances, but beyond that, many functions become increasingly unreliable. Instead of one big microblogging ocean, it feels more like an assortment of a few lakes and myriad puddles with only tenuous interconnection.
Personally, I’ve kinda given up on finding (or creating) my One True Instance and am resorting to having profiles on all of the biggest instances. This also has the advantage that arbitrary defederation decisions affect me to a much lesser extent.
I’d like to imagine their pineapple pizza was the absolute best there is on planet Earth, but in spite of (or maybe because of) that they just fucking hate making it.
Basically, the Ronnie O’Sullivan of pie shops.
“I’m allowed to do this… This place is literally named Chinatown”
Thanks to the wonders of capitalism, a bunch of businesses that would have to yield to tyrannical open source devs and their goody-two-shoes mentality can pool their bargaining power and each pay a little to a benevolent clean room reimplementer of security fixes.
Or, they can vendor the library and ask Claude to fix it in-tree 🤷