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.
I’m disappointed.
“The fediverse is open and interoperable!”
“No, not them.”
The thing is that this isn't really a marriage of equals; if Meta joins the Fediverse then Meta will swallow the Fediverse, simply by dint of having several orders of magnitude more users.
It would be akin to India applying to become the 51st US state; if we let them in, they'd end up controlling 80% of the House and the Electoral College and the US wouldn't really be the US anymore.
While I appreciate the analogy, the electoral college is a seriously broken system which hasn't protected proportional representation in a long, long time.
The electoral college was never intended to protect proportional representation. The whole idea of equal representation in the Senate was to avoid high population states running roughshod over the smaller ones. This obviously dilutes the influence of higher population states and amplifies the smaller ones at the electoral college.
The system is not broken though. It does exactly what it was originally intended to do 240 years ago. You just don't agree with it's intention and results
Each state gets a number of electors equal to its congressional representation (senators plus representatives). If the number of representatives weren’t capped it would go a long way towards making the Electoral College more representative of the population.
Article 1 of the constitution very clearly lays out how electors are supposed to be chosen and establishes the need for a census to reflect the population's growth. To say that the house is not supposed to have proportional representation while the senate represents non-proportional representation as a counterbalance is ignoring the long history of debate and the many laws passed to attempt to bring representation in the house in proportion with the population.
The system is broken. We do not know the 'original intent' and anyone trying to argue for constitutional originalism is either completely ignorant of how literally everything changes with time or trying to enforce their conservative ideals through a guise of legitimacy.
But this isn't really the right place to have this discussion (we're on a thread about defederating from meta) so I'm gonna withdraw now and not reply to any more responses about this.