For a while vendors tried to lock down the BIOS pretty hard. Dell might still, I remember having to call and get assistance when a password was forgotten and they had to generate a backdoor key of some sort. Maybe that is less of a thing now that Bitlocker is widely used on corporate laptops and it is sensitive to tampering.

In the past they had jumpers for the same purpose.

What fediverse services are set up that way? For most projects, the flagship instance is by far the largest. For Mastodon it is something like 900k difference between the next most popular instance.

It’s unfortunate if the sh.itjust.works folks aren’t speaking, their listed rules seem pretty reasonable and the problem users appear to be breaking the rules of that instance too.

Communities have moderators too.

Joining is immediate, where some Lemmy instances require manual approval even now.

The main page comes off as more approachable and familiar. They also have a ton of local communities (or “Magazines”) so people can do a lot even without the Federation. I find the Microblog stuff somewhat confusing, I think because it doesn’t have much of a UI built around it so it is less familiar than Mastodon. It is fairly centralized though, in the sense that there aren’t that many kbin instances out there.

Currently kbin is the only one I am aware of.