Meta has shown repeatedly that they aren't trustworthy. This is like watching a wolf eat every one of your chickens in the coop and then swearing up and down that if you let it in the hen house, it won't touch the chickens in there. Absolutely zero chance that they aren't going to try to take over and steal data and control it. Why else are they trying to come in? These corporations don't make moves like this unless they see a potential profit. I vote block.

I would defederate and block any and every instance owned or strongly influenced by meta on principle alone.

The more I read, the more I am in the camp of "let's not." Meta has rarely acted in the best interests of its own users; from their unethical experiments into causing depression to their privacy issue to... well, everything, they are classic examples of bad actors. The fediverse is not secure enough or big enough to counter Meta's takeover if we open that door... there's a reason we're in the fediverse and not the metaverse, after all.

The decision of whether to federate is up to the individual instances, and I'd not want it any other way. But I do think we should be encouraging instances to hold off on Meta-fying. Else, we'll be fighting Meta in a game that they're much better at than any of us are ever likely to be.

What concerns me is that Meta will likely be on their best behavior at first, making people who are rightfully skeptical look like alarmists. Some instances will then decide that it’s okay to federate with Meta, because they’ve played nice.

If Meta is smart, they’ll only show their true colors gradually and with subtlety. We must expect them to play the long game. It’s vital to remember that no matter how friendly they seem, Meta will always do whatever looks most profitable. There is no profit for Meta in allowing the fediverse to continue untouched.

I think it all comes down to why does Meta do anything? Money. And, the timing of their supposed interest in the Fediverse is after the second notable exodus from a major social network. Meta sees more people & more engagement here which equates to more potential profits on their end.

I looked into Mastodon after the whole Twitter thing in November, but I didn't really use Twitter, so an alternative at the time didn't make sense for me. However, I was an avid Reddit user for the last nine years, so when these API changes came to light and my app (Sync) was going to cease to exist, well I took the Fediverse alternatives more seriously and realized that ActivityPub is awesome technology that is now invaluable to the internet.

I'm here to stay.

I‘m here because corporations are a collection of moldy, parasitic assholes who enshittify platforms, how anyone can be on here and still have this naive trust in them is what truly confounds me.

If they were willing to participate in good faith and share traffic, or anything at all, why not just go ahead and spin up their little instance? Why the sketchy NDA shit? Why come for the admins and devs?

All they want is a monopoly on our data and on how the fediverse works, this move by them is nothing but an attempt to snuff out this blossoming community (aka competition).

They dress it up in doublespeak to make it seem beneficial to us, but if they get enough admins and devs on their side, those people will come to regret it in a few years when their community has no activity stemming from itself anymore and is overshadowed by some proprietary Meta nonsense they foolishly (or greedily if money is involved) signed up for.

Many people have migrated to the fediverse to get away from corporate overreach. Do not give them an inch.

Say what you will, certain communities won't have a problem either way because there's no way Facebook will willingly federate with them for longer than an hour.

Fediverse should be free and no one should rule over it.
What Meta should be defederated or not is owed by every instances.
By the way, Meta has a lot of scam accounts now, so it should be defederated from my instance.

Fuck Meta. We need to vehemently oppose their presence in the Fediverse.

This whole controversy irritates the fuck out of me, because it's driven by assholes who either don't grasp the nature of the fediverse or are willfully misrepresenting it.

By design, there are no mechanisms by which Meta can be prevented from owning an instance, and there are no mechanisms by which the fediverse as a whole can respond in any particular way. That's not a bug - it's a feature.

The exact idea behind the fediverse is that centralized authority is ultimately harmful, and that a social media network can manage without it, through the carrot and stick of federation/defederation.

So anyone who wants to start an instance can (which necessarily includes Meta). That's not an ideal or a policy - it's a fact. There's literally no way for anyone to stop anyone else from starting an instance.

And every instance owner can decide whether or not to federate with any other instance.

And every individual can decide which instance(s) they want to join or follow.

And that's it. That's the whole deal, right there.

The whole idea behind the ActivityPub protocol is that those things are sufficient to establish and maintain a healthy ecosystem. And ALL anyone can do at this point is wait and see if that works out to be true or not. There's literally nothing else anyone can do.

So all of this sturm und drang is just pointless, emotive nonsense. It's fear and hostility that cannot possibly have any bearing on anything. The system is already in place and events are already unfolding and it's all going to play out however it does and all of your hand-wringing abd fear-mongering and anger and demands mean NOTHING. They're just divisive noise.

I agree that Meta shouldn't be trusted, and thus not federated across the fediverse.

I say let's not even give them a chance. We owe them nothing.

I think there is no evidence that corporations are going to do what you all say they're going to do. Critical thinking is a thing, and judging without evidence is not a very good action. I mean, is there a tangible evidence that Meta is going to destroy the fediverse?

Embrace extend extinguish. Do not allow them to join if you want this community to last.

For anyone "willing to give Meta a chance", ask yourself:

Q: Why is Meta doing this?
A: To make money.

Q: How is Meta going to make money out of this?
A: By having as many users on their instance as they can, so they can sell their data and advertise to them (that is Meta's modus operandi, after all).

This is already antithetical to the entire fediverse concept, where you want users to be as spread out over instances as possible.

Having most of the users on one instance means the "community cost" of defederating from that instance is enormous to the point of being inadvisable for an instance admin. This brings us to a scenario where the 'federation' is essentially useless, as everyone is producing/consuming content on the one instance.

Therefore, the idea of a commercial entity using the fediverse, by itself, mutilates what the fediverse is all about.

I still don't see how things will exactly go bad for the existing instances by communicating with Meta instances.
The arguments in this article are "They won't moderate" and "Meta is evil". One is speculative, and one is biased... not convincing arguments to a neutral judge.

The drawback I see is that Meta communities will just be bigger and suck people out of the "nice" fediverse. But not federating with Meta won't change anything about it. If anything it causes harm because existing communities can't profit from the new Meta users joining.