I think defederation should be used as a last resort - specifically, I’m talking about an influx of tankies breaking feddit.uk’s code of conduct. I think actions supporting a protest of lemmy.ml should be left to the individual, as to whether they want to continue participating in those communities. Ideally, the communities move themselves to a different instance that’s less politicised, but that’s not the world we currently live in.
I worked with Perl for years, and I don’t recommend it for a beginner. There are just too many idiosyncrasies that belong specifically to the language that you’d be better off with Python for learning the basics.
I’m also not really sold on that book, which from the code samples looks really old. I’d recommend two books: Modern Perl and Perl Best Practices.
Edit: I’d also recommend working in Go but potentially the way i/o intersects with interfaces makes it a bit more challenging.