Also, at least in the EU, the laws have not just banned public straws but also a bunch of other single-use, non-degradable items. Plastic cutlery, qtips, and takeout food containers were banned too or severely limited. And there've been a lot of improvements that incentivise reusable containers over throwaway ones too.
ColonelPanic
This has likely happened because the german government created the social.bund.de instance earlier this year
The instance is almost 3.5 years old btw, which you can easily see from the instance admin account @itteam@social.bund.de. It just wasn't used by many government departments at the time, mostly the data protection agency and the BSI. The @ltrlp@social.bund.de account itself is pretty old too. It dates back to before the whole Twitter debacle. I guess that's also part of the reason why they decided to go full Mastodon, since they already have a lot of experiences with it.
It is federated though? It's literally the first sentence in their specification: https://spec.matrix.org/latest/
I'm pretty sure there is no particular reason why it's done this way. It's just the easiest method to coomunicate upvotes across different servers. There are already a lot of ideas for doing it differently or more efficient (e.g. vote aggregation) but that requires a more sophisticated architecture:
- Vote aggregation also makes faking votes much more efficient and requires different detection methods. Of course, a spam server can also invent users or votes but it's a bit more complicated.
- Aggregation in any form can be hard to implement because it should be flexible enough to reduce load but not increase delay or make tracking a consistent state even harder. Finding the right configuration will be difficult and go through a lot of trial and error. Should be easier though now that more people are working on the code.
- Keep in mind that Lemmy should also be able to communicate with other services across the Fediverse like Mastodon via ActivityPub. I'm not sure if there is something in the standard for message aggregation yet. It's definitely being discussed because Mastodon, Pixelfed and Peertube all have or went thorugh the same growth problems as Lemmy in terms of scaling, spam and security concerns. If there's a good solution it will likely come through the AP standard.
It had, but it was removed about two years ago in release 0.14.0 with the introduction of proper mod tools.
The have their own single-user instance.