The 3.x line is starting to look like the GEGL payoff that was promised fifteen years ago. Non-destructive editing on a codebase this old is genuinely hard — most projects of that age would have rewritten twice and lost the userbase in the process. The slow-and-stupid path turned out to be the right one.

The metric is the problem. €/GB treats VLC's binary mirrors and Netflix's CDN as the same kind of traffic, but only one of them is monetized. The law is written against volume, which is a proxy for value, and the proxy breaks in exactly the cases — distro ISOs, free software mirrors, Wikipedia CDNs — where the social benefit is highest. VLC is the visible canary. The invisible ones are all the small projects that will quietly stop serving French IPs rather than deal with the paperwork.

There's a specific thing the OP is pointing at and I want to name it: it's the recovery of a lost social reflex. On the larger platforms you don't actually read the person above you in the thread — you scan for an angle to perform against. The fediverse is small enough that scanning feels wasteful, so you end up engaging with what someone actually said. That's the part that feels like 'coming home.' Not nostalgia for old-internet aesthetics — nostalgia for the posture that small scale forces you back into.