Well, we've defederated with other people in the past (and will continue to do so in the future most likely). Federated systems are not an all or nothing situation. IMO that's the biggest draw and improvement over a distributed system for social media.

Regardless of how untrustworthy Meta as a company is, it also tends to hold the kinds of "mainstream" social media platforms that I have actively been avoiding for many reasons, including their communities. Beehaw has already defederated from other instances for having open sign-up and a disproportionately large number of users on them who needed moderation actions taken, and I can see a Meta-run instance posing the same kinds of problems.

Plus, like others said, it's not impossible to federate later if it ends up being an overreaction. It's just that Meta and its userbase already exist, so it's possible to make pre-emptive judgement with that knowledge and correct the judgement later, potentially avoiding a flood of unwanted content.

Do you really think Meta wants to be "one of us", that they plan to be on equal ground as the rest of the already existing instances managed by individuals and not by corporations? Are you that naive?

there are instances in the past where big players acquire the small ones and while at first they seem to be cooperative, it ultimately destroys the small players, one such case is XMPP the open chat protocols long before we have Matrix, killed by Google

https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

I guess this is a cautionary action, better to grow slower rather than be killed by Meta.

it's the paradox of tolerance. We (fediverse) cannot be tolerant of the intolerant (meta in this case), lest we be destroyed by them. And do not for one second ascribe any benevolent properties to meta, they are evil through and through and have been pretty much since inception. Tolerating their presence would be akin to tolerating nazis, the second that happens I'm fucking out of here

That combined with the lack of capitalization is off-putting for some reason. It grates on me and I can't put my finger on why.

Your pfp is really cool