Content warning: synopsis Of Meta invasion and bad faith in the fedi. a novel.
Wild couple of days. Bottom line is who cares. Be excellent to each other and there will still be a way to do so when Meta and Mastodon Inc finish ruining the current iteration.
So many talking heads and admins doubling down on "wait and see", name calling other admins and calling "kneejerk" the absolute correct side of history approach of Fuck Meta to the moon instablock.
There is NO argument about CAN or IF. Anyone including Meta can make make an ActivityPub platform. However, the fediverse is under no obligation to provide bad faith actors with proven dangerous and violent behaviour white glove service to our data and lives or even offer a "benefit of the doubt". Thousands are here specifically to not feed that machine.
It's also not kneejerk for strong negative response tp shady doings because even a brief window of allowing a presence like Meta to slurp our transitive boosts et al is a real and viable threat to health and safety based on absolutely repeated operating procedures of corpos, Meta specifically.
Yes bad faith actors appear all the time, sometimes the fedi manage to run them off. Are there still bad faith actors slurping and scraping and planting bots and moles, you bet, acknowledged. But again the fediverse is under zero obligation to throw hands in the air and say ahh whatves someone is gonna do it anyway let's give the keys to the kingdom to the biggest worst possible bad actors because whatevs and growth...
A preemptive block approach and not wanting to be a complicit cog in the Meta wheel of aggression and violence who have horrible history of supporting multiple genocides, ratting out to brutal states women seeking reproductive care, beneficiaries and poor folk, activists and community leaders, dissenting voices, and so so much more, is also not kneejerk, it's actually level headed, compassionate, and human.
Less about direct safety and a very real note. The entry of a player like Meta even if only a million or 10 million join their new platform quickly equals a 2x - 10x force multiplier on active fedi traffic. Mastodon and some derivatives are so piss poor at managing spikes in traffic and are super bloated in the back-end for processing relational traffic and storage. That's a recipe for speed run of the three Es.
This is class war as this will be a serious strain on servers that make the bad decision to federate with Meta, and it will preclude small servers from really being able to afford to operate.
For those that can scale infra costs even if not federated, the knock-on effect of backed up queues on other servers that may be Meta federated willingly or unknowingly is gonna be an unprecedented traffic jam of blown message queues, server hangs and outages. Right now when massoc has an onboarding burst or a burp, hiccup, blown update, outage or anything that backs up the queues, the entire fedi feels the pain and strain and has to bear real COSTS of admin, mod, sysadm, infra scale and $$$ to accomodate, image that at 2,10,20x power. Yikes. Again, the wider fedi (which is NOT Gargamel's Mastodon) is under no obligation to just shut up and take this because "growth".
It doesn't matter who was in an NDA meeting, it's bad faith all around, absolutely antithetical to historical fediquette, and you deserve backlash if you take the position of "wait and see" and "benefit of the doubt" for a bucket of shit like Meta who while weakened and desperate for some new angles to farm and sell content and people, still have the power to completely over-run directly or indirectly, technically or litigiously, and absolutely fiscally to play the long game and muscle out, fracture or island. Meta have nothing to lose and only more data and agency theft to gain. There can be no delusion they will operate an invasion of this scale with an absolutely alien set of ethics to their proven record.
Talking heads be warned, it is NOT a bad thing if massoc and Meta and Truth and a handful of admins who hate people become Fedi2 Electric Boogaloo. Who cares. Growth for growths sake is a capitalist scam and it's not really fracturing. If the dust settles on a human-centric anti corporate OG fedi with a whitelist and a charter that values safety and agency over volume and hate, that isn't an own by "unavoidable growth" players nor is it an L for the verse, that is humans being decent.
It is important to note that anyone even kinda siding with Mastodon, Meta and "wait and see" or "benefit of the doubt" should expect flack given the steady and incremental slimy centralising bullshit Mastodon Inc has undertaken under the guise of "easy onboarding" which always seemed like precursors to monetisation or overpowering the network with monolithic server populations.
Mastodon the company was already well on their way to being an island like Truth. That's not great for the many swindled users who had no idea mainly due to false narratives and slimy onboarding based on owning the public image. Sucks they have not experienced the joy of a lively and supportive home feed.
It is imperative to make the Meta platform an island straight away and work to mitigate the ripple effects on the wider fedi that will exhaust and overrun the small-medium operators that make the fedi weird and wonderful for users who love real engagement and a place devoid of overt corporate interference. That isn't anti growth or kneejerk, it's fucking pro human.
@antimeta is here monitoring now if you'd like to follow it. I've got it running manually for the moment, but I'm gonna cron the script on our server locally to run every evening at 0000 UTC to check for meta domains.
