If you don't believe point 3, go reread all the hype about them and Google adopting XMPP two decades ago. You'll see that it aligns perfectly with the one about Facebook and ActivityPub. Nothing has changed since. Meta ha nothing to gain from joining the Fediverse. They're a juggernaut set on monopolizing the web and wiping out the competition. They'll use the federation to kill off Twitter and BlueSky, and then to siphon out the Fediverse itself from the general consciousness.
Don't delude yourself in believing you can pull people from Meta to the open platforms through the federation channel. Not only it will not happen, but it'll actually be the reverse, right before they pull the plug.
This is the time to ask your admin to be explicit and clear on what their stance on the #Meta platform is, and if they're not planning on a fediblock, start looking for a different server.
There's now a #FediPact tag, and a website collecting signatories thanks to @vantablack https://fedipact.online/
You can also follow the progress via the dedicated FediDB tracker https://fedidb.org/current-events/anti-meta-fedi-pact
set up by @dansup
(a thankless work, apparently, given how many of you are harassing him. JFC, people, if you are unable to debate and criticize without resorting to harassment and insults, maybe consider that Twitter is better suited for you than the Fediverse?)
Of course, even if your admins have not signed, they may still be on the “preemptive block” camp, so do enquire with them to know —and consider moving to an instance that will block if yours won't. Especially if yours is a big one and you're moving to (or setting up) a smaller one, this is actually good for the health of the Fediverse regardless of how things go with #P92 anyway.
One thing I've noticed with people in the “wait and see” camp is that none of them seems to be able to answer this very simple question:
Meta is a known bad actor. It has a track record of abysmal privacy policies, catastrophic moderation (Myanmar genocide docet) and successful open protocol busting (XMPP). What information do you have that would even suggest this isn't what they're bringing to the Fediverse, to justify a “wait and see” attitude?
You can try asking, but IME you will never get a clear answer from them, just deflections to the tune of «defederating preemptively doesn't help» or «if we federate we can bring people over» (a pipe dream I've already criticized for its ungrounded wishfulness elsewhere) or similia.
But it's even worse when you actually consider the scenarios admins of the WaS camp will find themselves in.
The idea of WaS is to federate but, knowing this is Meta, be aware and ready to block at the first sign.
8/
Now consider this: what happens actually when (when, not if) P92 triggers the red flag that should cause the instance to be defederated?
If the admins DON'T defederate, they'll betray the commitment they have to the safety and protection of their users. But if they DO defederate, they'll piss off all the users (and the will likely be many of them) with connections on the P92 servers —and there will be a lot of them by sheer user ratio.
WaS admins are painting themselves into a corner: damned if they do, damned if they don't. Consider how heavy a decision to silence or block a large instance like mastodon.social is, or the clusterfuck that happened today when @stuxbriefly blocked mastodon.art from mstdn.social, and multiply that by the scale P92 will have compared to any other Fediverse instance.
One of the things the WaS camp is worried about is the “image” the Fediverse would project if it refused to federate with P92 right from the start (because apparently keeping a known bad actor responsible of genocide out is bad for our image, go figure). They're worried the choice might keep “developers” away from the Fediverse because it wouldn't be really open.
That's complete bollocks, of course (the Fediverse being safe from the corp silos is actually a selling point), but it's still nothing compared to the actual damage that would come to the Fediverse image the moment a large instance defederates from P92: there will be no end to the recriminations that the Fediverse is unreliable, blown out (again) to gigantic proportions, and this will permanently seal the fate of the Fediverse.
Which is what Meta wants. Is this what we want though?
TL;DR: the damage that will come to the #Fediverse when large #waitAndSee instances defederate from #P92 will be immensely worse than the one that works come from #preemptiveDefederation. And the damage that will come to it if they refuse to defederate even after the shit starts flying will be even greater.
@oblomov great text, motivated me to actually inquire with my admin.
Beyond blocking, there was a post somewhere in this whole #Meta jumble with someone recommending blocking meta IP ranges and such, to keep scrapers off the premises. They even had some script set up to make that easier. Can't find it, or I'd link it.
@simon_lucy@fedithom it's possible to go with rate limiting rather than IP, which works with scrapers in general (not just Facebook). ActivityPub is mostly a push protocol, so normal interaction doesn't do a lot of fetches
When the time comes, the wait-and-see, trust-and-verify admins will not block the Meta instance, even under conditions that would make them block any other instance.
@oblomov I think you're correct here. I keep seeing the wait and see folks say that they'll be willing to block the minute things become bad, but not a single one has defined what their red lines are.
I imagine this playing out slowly, not quickly. Meta is going to launch as a beta, with mostly celebrity accounts and big name influencers, plus a subset of "regular" instagram folks. Things will be mostly fine (ignoring all the valid privacy concerns).
@oblomov Next, they'll slowly onboard folks. Overtime conditions will get worse, but there won't be a clear moment where things got drastically worse, it'll just happen slowly. This will make it much more painful for these admins to block Meta, because a lot of their users may be fine with the riff raff coming from Meta, because they're largely not affected by it (because they're not marginalized folks).
@oblomov
The image I want to see the fediverse project is the image of an independent, community-controlled network which utterly rejects and humiliates Zuckerberg to worldwide attention, and definitively affirms that the future of social media lies beyond the psychopathic machinations of Silicon Valley
@oblomov I've been a "wait-and-see" myself. Until yesterday. The meeting under nda is what I consider the first sign of danger, the one that would get everyone to defederate
> What if this thing ends up being a service that can allow you to communicate with your friends who still use Facebook, via the Fedi, in a privacy respecting manner. That would be pretty cool, I think;
>
> We all know Facebook is a privacy vortex of doom so I doubt that would ever happen, but we shall see…
We shouldn't see this as representative of the "wait and see" camp.
@oblomov This is why I encourage all #Fediverse admins who plan on blocking #Meta to not only block federation with them, but also block all of Meta's IPv4 and IPv6 addresses at their server's firewall (usually iptables) from sending AND receiving packets to and from servers, to stop the massive flood of Meta's traffic in, and also to prevent data being mined about their servers by Meta. https://mastodon.moule.world/@MOULE/110586556696261405
@MOULE the IP blocking is going to be particularly interesting if, as some have proposed, Meta won't actually support ActivityPub, but just provide a cross-poster and a way to migrate from Mastodon to P92
"...as the news circulated I found that the amount of people deluding themselves into thinking we should welcome the upcoming Meta instance with open arms was much higher than I expected. Truly people never learn anything from history.
Seriously, how can we ever hope to find a solution to things like anthropogenic climate change when we can't even cope with the threat of surveillance capitalists siphoning off all the energy from the opportunity of a breakout?"
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