@mekkaokereke Great question. A debate has two sides, so on the pro-federation side my take is
the talking points in favor of federation (which I assume came from #Meta) are very persuasive to a lot of the current power structure -- including framing federation as a huge success for #ActivityPub/#Mastodon/"our vision".
some people may be making a tactical decision to signal potential openness in order to keep a seat at the table for as long as possible.
for a lot of people it would be unambiguously good to talk to friends on Threads, and they don't understand the risks others face from exposure to non-friends on Threads.
instance blocking has always been polarizing and (depending on the framing) this highlights the downsides. One of the talking points is that the are "extreme", "toxic", "religious" people who are talking about blocking instances that federate with Meta are "punishing" members of those instances.
dramatically overstating how good moderation is in general today today -- in conjunction not understanding the importance of transitive blocking in today's toolset.
cis people don't understand the threats of #LibsOfTikTok et al to trans people -- it's qualtiatively different from the bigots on the "freeze peach" instances.
there's a lot of potential money sloshing around. One pro-federation instance admin was quite candid about that, but I assume this is at least an unconscious consideration for app developers and hosting companies, many of whom also run instances.
On the anti-federation side, I can't speak for others, but at least from my perspective I see the debate as useful in shaping the post-Meta #fediverse.
Most obviously it's useful to pressure more admins to join the #FediPact or otherwise commit to defederate preemptively before people get hurt -- or at least to get them to commit to as clear a set of criteria as @Hachyderm's. It's also useful to highlight that the people who are in favor of federating are willing to compromise people's safety (including specifically #trans people's safety). And I also think it's a good opportunity to raise the priority of privacy and safety work here, which is badly needed.
Plus, the debates are good for message testing -- and help sharpen my advocacy. One of my posts wound up on Hacker News yesterday and the discussion there pointed out several areas for improvement (like including links about LibsOfTikTok, and also being clearer about a few other things). And I'm working on a revision of the draft threat modeling post, so the discussions also point to ways to make that better.
Of course even given all that, I might well be spending too much time and energy debating, which is something I can be prone to!
mekkaokereke
onepict