Well, Columbus himself didn’t conquer much. He established a few settlement, but the real conquering was done by others.

More accurate comparison would be:

Describe Hernan Cortez in one word.

(GPT-4) Conquistador

Actually, a lack of license doesn’t mean, “You’re free to do whatever you want”. Itt means “I retain full copyright and don’t give anybody any permissions”.

For me it’s a problem for the exact reason you think it’s fine: I don’t want centralization. If I did, I’d go to reddit. I do want each topic of discussion to be spread out amongst different instances and communities. But for that to be viable, you need a way to get all the content as easily as if it was all in one place.