I've changed my mind on "a large scale is the problem" (eg. running large fediverse instances, but also many other things in the world) - sort of. It's generally not *wrong*, it's just not the root of the issue.

I think the actual root of the issue is high *stakes*. Building something at a large scale is a common way to increase the stakes of something, but it's not the only one - depending on what you're doing, doing it at a small scale can *still* be high stakes, and therefore still be a bad idea.

We'd all probably be a lot better off if people stopped building high-stakes things, and thought about low-stakes alternatives instead. It should be possible for things to go wrong or even very wrong without the impact being so immeasurably big.