I just finished reading it. I must admit that I wasn't blown away at the start. But the last few paragraphs, especially about the "Embrace, Extend, Exterminate" strategy really convinced me.

I did not remember that Google chat was once a XMPP client and that they pulled the plug on this.

Anyway, I'm totally convinced that the fediverse is most probably better off without Meta. Although, I'm not sure how the fediverse admin can really block them. At some point, some people will want to see meta's stuff.

It almost feel like we need a legal organization around the fediverse. Just some unorganized random people won't save whatever we have here. If we still want this to be as free as possible, there will be a time where a giant company will fuck thing up and we may forget why we didn't want them here in the first place.

counterpoint:

1. we don't like Meta
2. we have very specific goals on this instance that Meta is totally antithetical to
3. we're quite open about not being open-fed with everyone and this is not out of character nor a contradiction of previous blocks we've made
4. our priorities are not "fediverse first" or "ActivityPub first", they're Beehaw first. the fediverse and ActivityPub are mostly tools for us to an end, and we don't accept some obligation to prioritize the greater health of those over our own thing.
5. even if you don't care about the rest of that simple logistics prevail here--we absolutely don't want to be responsible for potentially tens or hundreds of millions of additional users. that is not a thing we can ever commit to, and we will almost certainly sooner shut down the instance or completely defederate than eat that influx (particularly with Lemmy's limitations right now).

overall, i would say this falls into the camp of "not a thing we're realistically going to reconsider".

Well, we've defederated with other people in the past (and will continue to do so in the future most likely). Federated systems are not an all or nothing situation. IMO that's the biggest draw and improvement over a distributed system for social media.

there are instances in the past where big players acquire the small ones and while at first they seem to be cooperative, it ultimately destroys the small players, one such case is XMPP the open chat protocols long before we have Matrix, killed by Google

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

I guess this is a cautionary action, better to grow slower rather than be killed by Meta.

That combined with the lack of capitalization is off-putting for some reason. It grates on me and I can't put my finger on why.

Who says it's "supposed to be [fully] connected?" Who gets to decide for everyone that no one is allowed to block, no instance is permitted to separate or shape its own view of the network? What's the difference between what you want and Reddit? One solid mass of "everyone must be mashed together at all times and nothing may be done to protect against harmful parts of the network" seems to betray the point of federation far more than some instance(s) blocking others or just straight-up forming their own clique (in the graph theory sense) or separate network.

Basically my thought here is: defederation is the point of federation or else it would just be distributed hosting.

Quoting the FediPact:

Openness for the sake of openness is meaningless. Two things that are very valued on fedi are consent and freedom of association. The whole point of the fediverse is that instances are free to choose who they talk to. We don't have to federate with the likes of gab, for example. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell, chasing a capitalist pipe dream

You are on kbin, your experience will not be affected by this.

Your pfp is really cool