I can totally see where you're coming from.

On the one hand, the reason why I have chosen to eshew all social media and run degoogled Android on my phone is because of privacy concerns. So if Meta federates, I can access all that content from an app and network that respects my privacy, so that's good right?

My problem is not so much privacy, I'm more worried about the dominant position Meta achieves on the fediverse by it's sheer size. It will absolutely dwarf everything else. We already know this by just looking at the numbers, so if we wish to preserve the culture of the fediverse I see no other choice but to defederate and set up quarantined servers that exclusively federates with Meta and nothing else. Any server that federates will only see posts from Meta.

There might potentially be technical solutions to limit how much you see from one instance, but we don't have them right now.

For people in the FOSS sphere there is also a sense of "fool me once" when it comes to megacorporations engaging with projects, e.g. Google with XMPP, Microsoft with internet explorer, Google with Chrome and so on. There is simply no trust and we have been burned before in ways that has left lasting impressions that might be hard to understand if you have not experienced it yourself. Maybe it reaches a degree of suspicion that might seem paranoid to others.

I also feel that Lemmy right now gives me back a sense of what the internet used to be, before the walled gardens, and I feel that it is a fragile state of affairs that must be protected at all costs. It feels like I can finally breathe again after a long time with my head beneath the waters, and I don't want to be plunged under again.

Sorry for the ramble, I just felt like I had to put my feelings in print.

You know you're taking a stance either way? It's nice to say "wait and see", but you can wait and see while being defederated as well. Starting to federate is basically the same decision as stopping to federate. Just because the one happens by default does not mean that federation happening isn't a conscious choice.

It's like laying in bed all day. Yea, you were in bed, so it's the default, so you could say you just "wait and see what the day brings". But you're still effectively choosing to stay in bed. You don't need to be surprised if nothing interesting happens in your day, and it was your choice that nothing interesting happens.

Same with federation and defederation. We already know Facebook is a bad actor. If we federate with them, we're saying "all right let's tolerate the shit coming at us", we're not "waiting and seeing what the day brings", because we already know the day is not going to be interesting, since we're staying in bed.

Sure, you might discover a new game on your phone while in bed and the day might still be amazing. We might discover threads is not bad after all. But it's just so much more likely to have cool things happen in a day when you're out of bed doing things. Same as it's much more likely that Threads is going to be shit.

They don't want normie content and they're coming up with insane speculative excuses like a failed Microsoft playbook from the 90s that didn't even target open source software.