This used to come up a lot in meta-fedi talk on Mastodon. The general feeling (from my own observation) is that a central authority for user accounts would defeat one of the big advantages of decentralization: that one service going down does not bring the rest of the network down with it. If all logins have to authenticate to a central service, then if that service is offline then nobody can log in anywhere.
There is capability for federated login in ActivityPub, though, it just doesn’t seem to be very widely adopted. Pixelfed has a “sign in with Mastodon” login option, where you can use your login on a Mastodon instance to authenticate to Pixelfed, and then presumably you can use Pixelfed with your Mastodon account instead of having a separate Pixelfed account. My masto instance doesn’t seem to support it so I don’t know what it looks like.
In North America we’re being conditioned to accept ever-larger vehicles as normal, and it’s working beautifully (for car makers, much less so society or the environment).
My mom drives a Mazda something-or-other crossover, and gets annoyed when I call it her truck. She insists it’s a “car” and “not that big”, both arguments made foolish when I roll up in my Nissan Micra.
A while back I was comparing the 1987 Ford Ranger (what I learned on) with a more recent Ford Maverick, out of curiosity. The Maverick is nearly the same size as the Ranger (the box is a bit longer) but thirty five hundred pounds heavier. No doubt a lot of that is battery, but holy shit.
Nice to know Toyota still has a hatch. Nissan stopped selling the Micra in Canada and almost nobody has anything that small in their offerings now.