@EnglishMobster

If Meta has plans to go through with EEE, they will do it no matter what. Even if everyone defederated from them, they'd still build on ActivityPub in weird ways and break the protocol over time.

if no one is federated with them, then open source projects don't care if they break activity pub because nobody will be in a race to adapt in order not to break the federation. They will live happily in their own custom fediverse without affecting the community. I don't get why you struggle to understand this concept. I think it is because of

But we know that not everywhere will defederate with them. So what will happen is you're going to have a splinter group defederated anywhere that federates with Meta (or federates with somewhere that federates with Meta) and you're going to have... well, everyone else.

where you clearly struggle to understand that the one who is causing the issue here are the ones that opt to follow meta's path. The ones that will try to adapt. Not the ones that want no connection with the big corp. Instead of realising that meta has no good intentions, you side with them saying "it is what it is" and you just want to wait patiently till they actively start causing issues.

Then again, I think we're having the conversation in a wrong basis. Your biggest argument is that you want to be in the same platform as your friends. Yes, if for you the reason of existence of the federated network is to enable you reaching your friends who don't want to leave from their corporate networks, yes, then federation with meta is necessary. However the idea behind such network is not only to provide another UI to join a corporate network. Its much more than that.

I know I haven't replied/addressed all your points, most probably I'll come back later.