Some instances like pixelfed.art have manual sign-up confirmation so I guess that doesn’t scale particularly well. On the other hand it prevents sudden spikes in active users. 😀 The sign-up queue was 8000 there the other day.

I think that if EU was to retaliate against any of the big tech players (which isn’t going to happen imho since eu institutions don’t really display the affinity for swift and decisive justice it would require) it would make more sense to start blocking the advertising and/or data collection. Like a continent-wide pi hole. Still getting the message across while not impacting the users as much. At least not immediately. That said, the gatekeeper platforms should be prohibited from providing services like DNS resolving which are critical for the operation of other services than just theirs.