@Mammal @fish @icedquinn @light @phnt @sampler @silverpill @strypey The main issue with federation was that Gab was cramming shit in that no one wanted and they had the clunkiest UI (which Gleason turned into Soapbox, which is still the worst fedi UI) so they were bleeding users into fedi. They had to cut it off to stop people from going "I can still talk to my friends but I don't have to use Gab?" and hopping to a sane instance. Regular shit on fedi was a "pro" feature on Gab, they were suffering massive downtime, they botched federation (by putting Gab on as many relays as would take them, so they were spending all their bandwidth delivering bot posts to the rest of fedi) and they covered it in ads for whatever low-rent hustle Torba was doing. They expected that they could use fedi to get people to join Gab, based on the way they were talking, and when it went the other direction, they had to kill federation.
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