People act like facebook isn't a hellspawn of far right hatred, fascism, and general stupidity in all of it's glorious forms. I'm just fine with my instance defederating them because Im just fine with not seeing posts from Moms for Liberty, or proud boys, or ivermectin treatments, or whatever the fuck goes on over there now a days. If I wanted to see facebook shit, I'd go to fuckin' facebook wouldn't I? It has little to do with corporate or not corporate.

Just yesterday i was seeing this comment by one of the Calckey maintainers. pasting here for the lazy the relevant bit:

Okay, if your community can’t survive Meta using ActivityPub, then it doesn’t deserve to exist.

I frankly cannot fathom how can somebody be so blind to how odious it is. And yeah, when called up on it he also fell into "But the protocol!" arguments, which seems to be the take people holding the pro-Meta arguments are holding. They just don't realize that this is not a technical problem but a social one, it's not about the marvelous internet machine, but about the people that rely on it. Like Treebeard said, "a mind of metal and wheels".

The first quote is an great demonstration of using logical fallacies to sell a point, and I am glad the article breaks down the argument. Anyone using a loaded question such as:

Is the goal of the Fediverse to be anti-corporate/anti-commercial, or to be pro-openness?

Doesn't fundamentally understand the fediverse. Almost every projects goal is supporting the decentralization of these technologies. To quote the website fediverse.to:

The fediverse is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks.

Allowing a single entity with a larger and more dominate platform, more power in the legislatures of the world, and effectively infinite times more capital to come in destroys the decentralized nature. Meta also doesn't stand for "community-owned", "ad-free", nor "privacy-centric". Meta's goal here is pretty obviously to centralize and control the networks as much as possible, and scrap the remaining data from other instances, using the ActivityPub protocol. Meta is a corporation who's motives are to increase shareholder value. The fact these are community ran instances is like Walmart coming in to stomp out the local grocery.

If I run my own instance, I can choose who I share with and who I don't.

The simple fact of the matter is that I don't want my data to be Zucc'd, and clearly I'm not the only one who thinks that way.

I want something different away from that crowd. I want a community of nice people that get along. I want to get away from Facebook, meta, and all. They just suck the soul out of everything

Not convinced by the e-mail analogy rebuttal. There are plenty of small e-mail providers thriving alongside the giants. Nothing is stopping you today from paying your friendly local business or association to host a mailbox for you. Of course self-hosting e-mail is an absolute pain, but that's because most e-mail sent is spam, the drastic blocking is just needed. Similarly if the Fediverse sees any kind of meaningful adoption, preemptively blocking small instances will be needed to crack down on spam.

I'm cautiously optimistic about Meta adopting Activitypub for their new platform. It might signal enough interest to make other smaller (and more trustworthy!) actors follow suit and set up their own platforms or Mastodon instances.

I would be ok with allowing federation until they (inevitably) cause problems.

• Push Ad spam: Defederated
• Allow hate groups and blatant disinformation to spread: Defederated
• Try strong-arming changes to the fediverse?: Believe it or not - Defederated

Just let these instance owners do what they want ? 🤷 If they want to pre-emptively defederate, that's fine, let them. There will be instances happy enough to federate with them. Once there's trouble, they'll probably defederate.

The great thing about social media, is that you don't have to reach everybody - you just need to reach your community. If your community isn't on GAFAM then defederating won't change the experience.

From my paltry observations it seems like opinions about federating with Meta spread into the following:
1: All for-profit corporations bad, so no federation
2: Meta bad, so no federation
3: Meta bad, but wait & observe first
4: Growing the influence of fediverse is usually preferred
5: Free speech for all

Honestly the article resonates with me a lot. I assume many old-guards of Mastodon are ppl who are fully aware of how federation works & are somewhat left-leaning and anti-capitalist, so they have a tendency to not want to federate with Meta.

So it certainly doesn't help that a few very influential people signed the NDA to join the Meta meeting, which would almost signal that they are more right-leaning (which is not what most people are like on fedi). Regarding the NDA part: people sign NDAs for too many things in pharma (my undergrad field) so I didn't realize it was such a big deal... I think it probably rubbed too many people in the wrong way.

Also, for large general instances, I wouldn't be surprised if many people have ideological differences with their admin or their neighbors, which probably resulted in some "fun" discussions.

Finally, PSA: I know some people hate their admins now but please do not ever send death threats to people, seriously

To quote myself from an earlier thread:

It's probably a good idea to limit/defederate with this when it shows up, as it's a vector for EEE and Meta will be doing the usual data collection shit they do with their users, but now with Fediverse users as well. They just got hit with a big fine for violating the GDPR.

The arguments in the article about open protocols misses the point though. This is not a technical issue. It's also not a capitalist vs anti-capitalist issue, but a policy issue of who you want to associate with.

This was surprisingly worth every second of my time 1st I didn't know about this whole meta vs fediverse thing and 2nd it was highly informative and interesting to read, now I totally understand why they wanna defederate from threads

@giallo I like the “to quote myself from earlier‘, so I will as well.

I want to address the uproar in the Fediverse about preemptively blocking the Meta ActivityPub product. And whether it should be at the instance or individual user level. A variety of reasons for and against this have been given.

At the moment, I would go with the latter. But no matter the arguments, the reason every single Fediverse user should block it is that Meta is a box of c*nts.

They have always been a box of c*nts. And they will always be a box of c^nts. Meta should be trusted as far as I can kick Zuck. About six feet. They will immediately or eventually try to enshitify whatever product they launch. At that point, administrators should block them at the instance level.

Maybe I am wrong, but maybe the Easter Bunny is real.

Do I need to remind anyone these are the mofos greenlighting the spread of misinformation of all types, science denial, propaganda from the enemies of democracy, conspiracy theories from every lunatic on earth, election stealing, suicide instigation for teenagers, and the mass genocide of Muslims in Myanmar?

While I fall on the other side of this debate (I'm pro-federation with Meta), this article helpfully distinguishes between people's conflicting priorities. For some users it's important to defend Mastodon as a community and a set of social norms. For me the goal has always been wide adoption of the ActivityPub protocol. Mastodon was just a useful way to kickstart adoption, and Meta adopting it would be a huge boon to the protocol.

I'm not personally very interested in a small community of like-minded people on a mini-Twitter. I want a mega-social network linking multiple services, including big corporate ones and small community-run ones, like email or podcasting (as someone else here mentioned).