Appointing a justice can be very difficult to do if your party doesn’t control the Senate. If Democrats control the Senate or the presidency, then Republicans won’t be able to stack the court.

The brand recognition of Mastodon is a rounding error for players like Meta and Google. The fediverse needs time to grow its user base. If we open the doors to the tech giants from the start, then their users will have no motivation to leave those platforms. On the other hand, we would leave ourselves vulnerable to the allure of moving back to the tech giants whenever they decide the time is right to cut us out of their walled gardens.

If we want decentralized social networking to thrive, then we have to leave big tech out of the equation.

This is the first E in Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. At the end of the day, Meta will do whatever it believes is most likely to maximize its profits.

Meta is a fisherman, and this is the bait. We need to recognize the threat that corporations pose to decentralization quickly and refuse to federate with them before the EEE cycle can even begin.