Fediverse

The reason is that Meta is an extremely harmful company. They've enabled the worst kind of people in their pursuit of "engagement". It's no exaggeration to say that Facebook enabled a genocide. So if people are (correctly) quick to block instances where fascists congregate, why would Meta be treated any differently just because they have a ton of users? They enable fascists, they provide them with a platform. And now they want to bring that platform to the Fediverse, which has been a place that has traditionally been anti fascist.

And that's just assuming they'll be good citizens and won't do an embrace, extend, extinguish thing, which we all know they will do whenever they feel secure enough in their position to do it. So rather than waiting until Meta is already integrated and it's harder to do it, the idea behind all this is to prevent the issue from coming up in the first place.

Essentially at some point in the past few days (we don't know when for reasons that will be clear), it was revealed that Meta had a meeting with unnamed admins of big Mastodon instances, presumably about facilitating their entrance on Fediverse, making them sign an NDA.

Seems like Eugen Rochko, admin of the biggest Mastodon instance (mastodon.social) and maintainer of the protocol was in it, and we suspect that the maintainer of mstdn.social and of Universeodon were in too. We don't yet know who else. I made a post about it with some evidence and more info.

Of course people in the Fediverse are about the least Meta-friendly people you'll find, so that petition sprouted as a reaction, looks like people will outright wall-off any instance connected with Meta.

Since this shitstorm is barely a day or two old there hasn't been that many developments but i imagine that there will be consequences, maybe premature defederation of these instances, forking of the Mastodon code, we don't know yet, we'll see.