Before everyone freaks out, this has zero impact on our communities. Chill.

They can already do this by bringing content from Mastodon to Meta platforms via links and screen grabs, this only speeds up the process.

Personally, I love that they're not federating day one. Because I don't want any instances I use to federate with them, I don't want to be connected to a Meta platform unless I deliberately go to a Meta platform to use it.

To expedite the process, Mastodon instances should just defederate from them entirely. Don't let them access that data through ActivityPub. They can build their own platform on the Fediverse and we can have our network of smaller connected instances.

Them doing this does not affect our communities unless we let it. Defederate from them and we can go on our merry way and they can have their own ad laden instance that's not connected.

Everyone, relax. Continue building your communities here and ignore Meta in their unconnected instances.

There’s a lot of evidence to be worried about this.

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

I've seen that article and no, we still don't need to be worried. Just defederate and that's all. As evidenced by the final paragraph:

Fediverse can only win by keeping its ground, by speaking about freedom, morals, ethics, values. By starting open, non-commercial and non-spied discussions. By acknowledging that the goal is not to win. Not to embrace. The goal is to stay a tool. A tool dedicated to offer a place of freedom for connected human beings. Something that no commercial entity will ever offer.

Just keep using it as the community building tool it is, defederate and protect those communities and we're golden.

Everybody relax.

The microblogging corner of the fediverse definitely needs a bit of restructuring to make it robust against something like this. A lot of people are on larger servers that are openly inviting Meta, even excited about their arrival, and believe very strongly that the space should be completely open.

They actively speak of people not wanting to federate with everyone as trying to "destroy" the Fediverse by making people who are totally married to a non-distributed service model fear or detest the space. There are many people on their websites who think they want something like this to happen, so that "everyone" will be here, and it'll be just like on Twitter (or something). But I don't think they're actually going to like it once the space is flooded with people who are jacked up on psychological manipulation and who don't even know the rest of space exists.

The people who come to the Fediverse and stay all end up saying the same thing: "It feels like what X used to feel like". And X used to feel that way because corporate interests weren't pushing their anger and aggravation buttons every 15 seconds, nor that of everyone they interacted with. But the space will be dominated by people getting poked and prodded for profit, and things will turn sour.

And they might not even ever recognize why it happened, because they believe they want this.