See below:
cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/798826
although this is unlikely to substantially and directly impact us and is a more immediate concern for Mastodon and similar fediverse software, we've signed the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact as a matter of principle. that pact pledges the following:
i am an instance admin/mod on the fediverse. by signing this pact, i hereby agree to block any instances owned by meta should they pop up on the fediverse. project92 is a real and serious threat to the health and longevity of fedi and must be fought back against at every possible opportunity
the maintainer of the site is currently a little busy and seems to manually add signatures so we may not appear on there for several days but here's a quick receipt that we did indeed sign it.
Frankly, I am leery (due to the 3 Es and will probably be blocking them on Mastodon as I do not think my server will. That being said, I am curious to see what happens and will not do it until I peer into the void... I plan on camping out on Mander either way. :)
I prefer to wait and see.
Obviously I also do not like Meta's track record, and I would never be in favor of any change in either the activity pub protocol or on Lemmy on the basis that it is a change that helps to integrate with Meta's platform.
I would block them if they were to deploy a harmful strategy. For example, if they dump massive amounts of content in a way that fills up the disks of smaller instances very quickly, or if they try artificially inflate the popularity of posts from advertisers. But I don't feel an urge to respond before it happens.
The ActivityPub protocol is quite robust to the presence of a malicious instance. No more than the necessary information is passed on to other instances, so from a privacy/data mining perspective I am not worried.
I read the article about how the Metaverse could kill the fediverse. But Google Hangouts is dead and XMPP works excellently from my home server, so I don't think it is all doom and gloom. I have read through many issues from the Lemmy developers and some discussions from ActivityPub development, and they really do not look like the type of people who would side-track their project to help Meta out.
That said, my desire for open and decentralized networks is a lot more important to me than my dislike of Meta.
I don't want to sign a promise of blocking something in the future that doesn't even exist yet. When they do open their platform, we will see what reality looks like. And then we are free to make a choice.
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