I'm changing my stance on the whole Meta/project92 thing after reading this article. I think the entire* fediverse should block project92 by default. Later, some instances can re-evaluate whether to maintain those blocks, once we have a better idea of what the benefits and consequences of federating will be:
Of course, it's possible to work with companies you don't trust. Still, a strategy of trusting the company you don't trust until you actually catch them trying to screw you over is ... risky. There's a lot to be said for the approach scicomm.xyz describes as "prudently defensive" in Meta on the Fediverse: to block or not to block?: "block proactively and, if none of the anticipated problems materialise within time, consider removing the block." Georg of lediver.se frames it similarly:
We will do the watch-and-see strategy on our instance in regards to #meta: block them, watch them, and if they behave (hahahahaha) we will see if we unblock them or not. No promise though
Previously, I'd thought "some block, some federate" would be the best approach, as described in this post by @atomicpoet:
My stance towards Meta is that the Fediverse needs two types of servers:
Lobby servers that explicitly federate with Meta for the purposes of moving people from Meta to the rest of the Fediverse
Exit servers that explicitly defederate with Meta for the purposes of keeping portions of the Fediverse out of reach from Meta
Both approaches not only can co-exist with each other, they might just be complementary.
People who use Meta need a way to migrate towards a space that is friendly, easy-to-use, and allows them to port their social graph.
But People also need a space that’s free from Meta, and allows them to exist beyond the eye of Zuckerberg.
Guess what? People who use Meta now might want to be invisible to Meta later. And people who dislike Meta might need a bridge to contact friends and family through some mechanism that still allows them to communicate beyond Meta’s control.
And thankfully, the Fediverse allows for this.
The upper hand of Facebook getting BTFO. I don't like mentioning the quote about his Harvard data collection because people post it all the time and it feels overused, but I feel it's particularly relevant here:
I'd rather we not repeat the same mistake. This time we know full well not to trust him, and I say this as someone with a considerable amount invested in Meta right now.
Again, meta joining doesn't change anything for you if you don't follow and you block it yourself.
activitypub is already a public protocol.
It's about people. You have your agency to act as you see fit. There are good people on meta platforms that i hope to invite here and activitypub makes that possible.
That's all that matters.
If its about privacy and protecting your data from corporations, activitypub is the wrong protocol for that.
The casual user is not the informed user
At risk of sounding aloof, but the "normies" won't care, they just want what's easy, not what's best long term. It's a bigger problem with humanity TBH.
XMPP is a "public protocol" too, google came in, "supported it", then defederated from it and took all their users. Big companies have technical sway, hell, just look at how chrome can push and block w3c standards because its the big voice in the room and you either conform to them or slowly die.