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Sure. You have three choices at scale on the crusty, ridiculous, and stupid protocols of the Fediverse:

1. Watch your servers melt because the protocols are indefensible;
2. Spend all your money on more servers and bandwidth that no one uses; or
3. Turn federation off.

98% of Gab was insular at the time. It wasn’t worth spending another dollar on federation. So we turned it off.

That was done on purpose, and I’d do it again if all things were equal. Federation added nothing but cost to Gab because no customer was using it, it was under constant attack depriving other tasks of attention, and I’m a ruthless bastard who doesn’t care at all about how loudly the people on the fediverse cry about my decisions.

Reality: I was paid by the people using that website to build them a website they could use. They don’t care about the Fediverse, and federation was depriving them of performance and the development of the features they did want.

So, we turned off federation, watched the people of the fediverse have a meltdown because that’s what they do best, and gave our customers what they wanted: More racism, and fewer troons/furries.