I don’t know the full story but I’m aware of an association between pleroma and some of the nastier, nazier corners of the fedi. My guess is that many of the larger instances running pleroma have been defederated from their masto counterparts.

A quick Google of “pleroma Nazis” gave me this, probably more nuanced, explanation: https://medium.com/@Trevatos/gnu-social-pleroma-and-the-mastodon-culture-conflict-3b10872937c2

I think subdirs would break the whole fedi handle system; deafboy@deafboy.social/masto wouldn’t make sense to most clients.

Fwiw, after lemmy.ml announced last week that they would preemptively block/defed anything owned by Meta, and lemmy.world didn’t, I got the heebie-jeebies and relocated my main account to .ml. I’ve learned to listen to little red flags like that and now this.

Edit: just to add that it might be nothing. I hope it’s nothing and that I’m overreacting. But…

That is awesome! (Both the pic and the fedi skills)