Do you think Eugen has been personally moderating all Mastodon instances up until now?

He hasn’t. Obviously the moderation system has nothing to do with what is being discussed here.

bluesky has more funding for self-promotion.

Back when I was on Twitter (a couple of years ago now), all links to Mastodon were explicitly marked as “unsafe”, and posts containing such links were demoted. So it’s apparently kind of normal for these social media companies to attempt to choke new competition as early as possible.

One advantage of Pixelfed is that it not a commercial company. So unlike Instagram, they do not have financial motivation to addict and exploit. So for people who are interested in seeing and sharing picture galleries, that seems like a good option to me.

(Personally I don’t use Instagram or Pixelfed, or any other similar service.)

Thanks. I do remember this now. I don’t remember it costing a lot of money, but I do remember people generally disagreeing with the idea of it - and then being amused by how it was to be implemented. And yes, to get around this filter I changed my DNS server from the ISP’s default to instead use Google’s. (This was far enough in the past that I wasn’t yet anti-google!)

I’m an Australian, and I don’t remember the ‘firewall’ that you’re talking about. Do you have a link or something to remind me?