this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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While I fall on the other side of this debate (I'm pro-federation with Meta), this article helpfully distinguishes between people's conflicting priorities. For some users it's important to defend Mastodon as a community and a set of social norms. For me the goal has always been wide adoption of the ActivityPub protocol. Mastodon was just a useful way to kickstart adoption, and Meta adopting it would be a huge boon to the protocol.
I'm not personally very interested in a small community of like-minded people on a mini-Twitter. I want a mega-social network linking multiple services, including big corporate ones and small community-run ones, like email or podcasting (as someone else here mentioned).
This too should be a selling point for the Fediverse, no? There will be Mastodon, kbin, etc. instances that do federate with Meta, and some that don't. And that's fine, because the platform encourages the choice in freedom of association.
But, as demonstrated by the quotes that begin this article, there seems to be an abstracted, ideological opposition to the idea of anyone defederatinfg with Meta. I don't necessarily want "a small community of like-minded people on a mini-Twitter" either (we'll put), but I do want my information to not be (easily) accessible to corporations who openly intend to abuse it.
That really is the dream, where your mini-community can link up and be part of the mega-community. Mega-communities linking together so you aren't missing out on friends being on other sites you don't use. An actual web of social networks and communities accessible from your own.
Maybe the losses incurred by enshittification won't be as devastating if a community can just choose to uproot to their own instance without losing years, even decades, of historical content when the inevitable happens.
With Meta though, there's a deep and deserved mistrust to overcome before anyone remotely in the know will have anything to do with them. You could probably convince most sites to federate with anyone but Meta, Twitter, or Reddit if it happened tomorrow. TikTok is on thin ice, though.