A metaphor and a an addition related to my earlier wonderings about Mastodon and upload filtering:
It’s as if because of a law requiring hammers to be registered, you’re wondering if you’re going to register your screwdriver. Just because some people use the handle of their screwdriver to hit a nail occasionally, and ignore its primary functionality.
Yes there are very large Mastodon instances, the top 3 hold over 50% of all users. These instances might well fall within scope of the EU Copyright Directive. But ‘fixing’ the underlying ActivityPub protocol or federation isn’t the issue here. Fixing big instances is. In fact most Mastodon users, as they are on the biggest instances, don’t use federation at all because most of their interaction is within the same instance. Mastodon.social, pawoo.net and mstdn.jp, the 3 biggest instances, I’d argue are hardly part of the fediverse, despite e.g. mastodon.social being its poster child and point of entry for most.
Don’t make someone’s bloated instance’s issue to be a huge issue for the fediverse as a whole