“target disk mode”, which this claims to be taking a lot of inspiration from, pretty much turns your computer into an external harddrive - so you can connect another machine to it for direct access. This appears to be trying to accomplish the same, but over the network.

If you’ve ever stuffed up a machine so badly that the best idea you could come up with, was to take the harddrive out and work on it from another machine - this pretty much allows you to do that. But instead of taking the drive out and putting it an external drive enclosure, you just ask the stuffed up machine to act as the external drive enclosure.

I have a fairly opinionated stance on this. Except in your sudo example where you’re specifically using sudo for a reason, I document all commands as non-root, and do not instruct them to raise privs. Whether or not they have, want or need privs, and how they raise them, is their system not mine.

It’s not exactly user friendly, but I don’t like to encourage people to blindly copy & paste commands that raise privs. That should be a conscious decision where they stop and ask themselves if & why it’s necessary.

I’ll be honest, I’ll assume bad faith from Meta until proven otherwise.

A good example here is the first version of Google chat, which federated with jabber - until it didn’t. I was quite vocal about converting my friends to it because it was an easy entrance to jabber, with a brand and interface they trusted.

Then once it was big enough, jabber federation was cut off and we looked like the weird outsiders.

Federating Meta will feel like a win right up until it doesn’t.