What makes this especially bad is the fact how Pixelfed is basically only one big instance which contains all the users and beeing run by someone who's not really good at responsible disclosure and generally not really friendly towards the community.
I was just told that it's a big instance problem more than a small instance. Somebody else on the instance has to have a follow request approved by the victim so I can follow them without their consent, so it's not like I can make my own private instance just to violate people's privacy, see
But really that's a Fediverse problem in general. When I joined up I came to the conclusion that it didn't make sense, from the viewpoint that I participate in social media to be visible, to join anything but the largest instance. Someone could disagree, but I think enough people would agree with that to maintain the dominance of large instances.
Mastodon total: 7,792,207 - biggest instance mastodon.social: 2,627,588 --> 33%.
Pixelfed total: 675,348 - biggest instance 437,361 --> 65%