You may have a look at GrapheneOS or other custom firmwares for your Pixel 4A to get an extended period of security patches.
I see your point with moderstion policy (hexbear etc.).
The aspect of local topics (aussie.zone), I see very critical for the fediverse. I see the same pattern here with the German-speaking communities on Lemmy. A huge part of them was historically hosted on feddit.de. The administrator of that instance lost interest in the project, downtimes soared and the instance is basically dead now. As an alternative, people founded feddit.org. Feddit.org is actively maintained right now but still the majority of the German content is focused on that instance. The communities AFAIK never grew again to the old size. If Feddit.org goes down as well one day (for whatever reason), I think chances are high that the German communities simply get lost as the frustratration grows everytime you start over again. Similarly, it would be a bad idea if every German was using the same German provider for their e-mails.
Personally, I’d prefer if Australian, German and every other ‘bubble’ (Solarpunk, Veganism, …) would be more distrubuted across various instances. That makes the fediverse more resistent against outside attacks, internal conflicts, downtimes and less dependent on single instance administrators.
I guess the instance doesn’t matter too much as you can interact with any content and people independent from your home instance. Personally, I’d recommend a medium-sized all-purpuse instance. Medium-sized because I think it’s important for the fediverse not to concentrate everything on one or twp major hosts and very small hobby projects are probably more likely to just disappear out of a sudden.
Would it be racist to now give more money to the darker skinned people?
From my perspective, yes.
The redistribution of the generational wealth should be adressed as well by politics but that should be independent of the racism discussion. Significantly unequal distribution of money due to inheritance is more and more dividing society. But I don’t care if the rich people have a lighter or darker tan.
If you target inequality with inequality in the opposite direction, you’re just feeding rightwing narratives IMO.
If you consider only the RAM on the developers’ PCs maybe. If you count in thousands of customer PCs then optimizing the code outperforms hardware upgrades pretty fast. If because of a new Windows feature millions have to buy new hardware that’s pretty desastrous from a sustainability point of view.
And if they don’t have to pay for homes outside the company you can reduce the salary and charge them for rent.