Point is, a hash isn’t a password. giving the most you don’t need tech knowledge analogy, it’s like the passwords fingerprint.

The police station may keep your daughters fingerprint so that if they find a lost child they can recognize it is your daughter beyond any doubt. Your daughters fingerprints, is like a hash, your daughter is a password.

The police should not store your daughter… that’s bad practice. The fingerprints are all they should store, and needless to say the fingerprints aren’t your daughter, just as a hash isn’t a password.

I mean short and long term there’s pros and cons to that. however there’s a reason why that started to fall appart with e-mail. In short if it gets popular, than hosting servers with no throttling or post limits means spammers are going to go crazy, and rather than play the never ending unwinnable whack a mole game as bad actors create thousands of instances a day, hosts of any instances worth targetting will have to do a “instances are assumed malicious until proven benign”, (IE a whitelist method)

Any instance hitting one million is unlikely, on the mere grounds of trying to make one super instance is kind of the opposite of the goal of federation. The winning would be reaching a million members between all instances.

Simply put, I disagree.

Here’s the fact of small groups that are made for the “outs”. The same pattern we’ve seen for every single “free speach” social media site. Bottom line is every social media site, has some level of what I’d agree is bad moderation that’s blatently banning people for say things like saying things to address police violence, income inequality etc… Things that are legitimate subjects that should be open to discussion.

However, 90% of people who get banned from social media, are people doing things that no one outside of their echo chamber want to be anywhere near, literal pro Nazi’s, White Supremicists etc…

The problem is, in general say if we magically turned all moderation off on say facebook, and let everyone back on, that would be relatively low impact, the non nazi’s would be 99%, the nazi’s would be the relatively small niche.

However, most people aren’t leaving their existing social media websites. Which means people looking for new social network sites, are disproportionately people that no one wants to be associated with. So when a new social media site opens up, promising not to moderate them… (Miwi, Truth, Gab, Parlor etc…). in 2 seconds it becomes flooded with people that, quite simply put scare off anyone who isn’t them away.

So long and short, in a new social network, if you don’t keep out the very extreme. You’ll never be able to develop a community around that isn’t extremes.

In short, simply lemmy has been slowly growing by tiny amounts for a year… but it hasn’t gotten nearly ready for major growth. Then reddit of course did the huge things causing lemmy to grow at 10x it’s normal predicted amount, and because it’s especially people from reddit, many of which don’t really understand federation yet. They assumed joining the main instance is the way to do it. (rather than understanding that almost all instances can communicate with eachother).

In short it’s a perfect storm for excessive growth on too small of a segment. on a network that wasn’t prepared for the sudden increase in demand.