Her being portrayed by the media or the memes as the "whiny girl seeking attention" is also worrying as well. It really distracts from the real issue and diminishes her work as well.
Ah yes, let's disregard centuries of occupation accompanied by brutal exploitation of the local population, dismantling and dismemberment of native social hierarchy and 'population transfer' for the benefit of the few white man and their collaborators. But hey, they built churches and trains and shit! Let's conveniently forget how countries that barely got their independence had their chance at economical and political sovereignty hijacked from the same colonial masters now dressed in business suit.
Sigh. At least the benefits of federation include being free to move into other instances while LW can pull stuff like this (probably because they get the heat from being the largest instance).
I'm also against blocking proxies, but we the privacy minded folks are a minority that actually uses vpn or tor for everyday internet browsing. There are lots of bots and malicious actors using our resources to spam large instances, and if I were managing a popular fediverse instance, I too would have been forced to consider blocking vpn/tor, even if I didn't want it.
We can point fingers at Pichai, but I don't think Larry Page and Erik Schmidt would have been able to keep Google true to its visions even if they really wanted to. Google simply became too big and successful compared its humble cool techy startup era, no way it was remaining the same all along.
They're all trying to reinvent email by bolting something else on top likely an in-house implementation of whatever's hot at the moment. However, the supposed benefits are completely gone once you're exchanging mails with any other email host.
Can't wait for it to die and wither out. But I know they will retain a big pool of users on hostage like reddit or fb for a while.