non-stickied PSA: Beehaw has signed the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact

alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgmod to Chat@beehaw.org – 657 points –

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.

186

I guess I'm the odd one out when I say I fully support this decision. I do not trust Meta, I Do not trust their intentions, and they have given me no reason to trust them.

Thanks Beehaw.

Good call from the instance admins. Meta's been a known actor for over 10 years at this point, which is more than enough time to observe their behavior (including up to a few weeks ago when they got fined for violating the GDPR). They're not going to be participating in good faith and we don't need to give them a chance to shit up the Fediverse.

Meta is not a brand new, fresh-faced corporation that maybe needs a chance to prove it's good intentions in the fediverse. It is an established entity that has a history of killing competition and often being on the wrong side of social issues. It should be rejected from federation outright because of its track record, if nothing else.

I’m disappointed.

“The fediverse is open and interoperable!”

“No, not them.”

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.

I agree, but why defederate before knowing any details? What is the harm in hearing them out

it's literally Facebook. i think we've heard and seen more than enough to from Mark Zuckerberg and the platform which actively continues to be one of the worst vectors of online harm, misinformation, and advocacy for social and political violence (among many, many other ills). particularly with respect to our instance: their project can get fucked as far as i'm concerned.

Yea, i'm not sure how much benefit of doubt we should be handing Mark Zuck of all people. There's few people in the world who make their intentions more clear than him. Not that i'm trying to paint him as evil, i'm not and i don't think he is, but i also see no reason to expect self-run instances to offer an olive branch to him.

We should be vary paranoid about Embrace Extend Extinguish in these communities.

Anyone here into cross stitching? I'd like to send the Zuck a cross stitch that just says, "Get Fucked"

ahhh, now i think it'd be a funny collaborative idea to send him a fediverse communal "Fuck Off!" blanket

I'd also add that they have, in the past, conducted unethical experiments on their users to attempt to manipulate said users' emotional state. I'm just a cross poster here, but I respect the stance.

The details are under NDA and Facebook has a really bad history of having a terrible moderation culture. I don't see any reason based on their past history to believe that they will change.

It feels kinda like giving a gun to a serial killer and just waiting it out. It's an exaggerated analogy but I think it illustrates the point well.

Given the number of competitors they've killed or absorbed, you're not far off. Heck, they even stomped Google.

before knowing any details?

before? facebook is almost 20 years old, they've had plenty of time to show us who they are and they have. If you have any doubt about their moral fiber then I suggest you pull your head out of your ass and enter the fucking 2020s

If there's no issues then we can refederate at any later time.

What is the harm in waiting?

Can't find the source, but I did see a rumor they'll be turning on federation a few months after the official release so as to not spring all of this place on a bunch of old people. So if they do that, they'll already have their own ecosystem/culture in place. I'm also a bit worried the extended introduction is going to lull people.

I think regardless, it always needs to be at the forefront of user's minds that they're not averse to playing it slow. Likely, they'll be on their best behavior starting out, especially since having a working platform at all means making as many friends in the fediverse as they can. They're not gonna come in swinging their junk around like spez.

Acting the gracious benefactor will not stop them from leaving this place a haunted backwater once they gather enough standing to start poaching users via shiny toys and high engagement. The kbin dev hasn't said anything to my knowledge yet, but being an overly reliant lapdog was XMPP's mistake and I support defederating as honestly the best way to avoid that.

Theirs is always going to be a numbers game, any niceties will be presumed by me to be a fakeout, and I'm pissed off that what was supposed to be a way to worm out from under the corporations semi-permanently stands to be drowned out immediately by corporations.

I think if this were a new player in the market, say for example a new social media platform that was going to venture into the fediverse, most people here would give them the benefit of the doubt.

However this is meta, they shouldn't take get the benefit of the doubt with how they've been operating over the last decade. There's no good faith that they'll be good participants

Corporations are motivated by profit. One of the ways Meta profits is by using your personal information for targeted advertising. For them, “community building” is a means, not an end. What else could you possibly need to know?

If a known con artist asks you to listen to their pitch, are you going to “hear them out”, or slam the door in their face?

because history

And just so happens to be the same pesky thing people refuse to read, color me surprised. 🙄

The same harm the inhabitants of the henhouse would come to if they decided to hear the fox out.

Don’t pretend like Meta is going to be open and interoperable.

You can’t look at their history and think letting the fox sleep in the hen house is a good idea. The house is for hens.

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.

it's the paradox of tolerance. We (fediverse) cannot be tolerant of the intolerant (meta in this case), lest we be destroyed by them. And do not for one second ascribe any benevolent properties to meta, they are evil through and through and have been pretty much since inception. Tolerating their presence would be akin to tolerating nazis, the second that happens I'm fucking out of here

This talk of tolerance reminds me of something I read[^1]: Tolerance is a peace treaty, not a moral obligation. With this line of thought, the intolerance of intolerance stops being a paradox and makes a whole heck of a lot of sense. Intolerance broke that peace treaty before it even entered into it, IMO.

[^1]: It may have been this opinion piece: https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1af7007d6376

Do you really think Meta wants to be "one of us", that they plan to be on equal ground as the rest of the already existing instances managed by individuals and not by corporations? Are you that naive?

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.

Oh certainly; my point was simply that in a system where population = influence, letting in a new group with several times as many people as all of your existing groups put together means that that new group effectively takes over.

And yet Even if India did join the United States as the 51st state, It occurs to me that The billionaires incorporations would still be in charge. Which is to say, although the huge population of Meta is a concern, I fear the power of Mark Zuckerberg's billions far more.

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

The electoral college was never intended to protect proportional representation.

Article 1 of the constitution very clearly lays out how electors are supposed to be chosen based on the census. To say that the house is not supposed to represent 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.

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.

Yeah the size is what I think is most worrying. I've only just got here so I'm pretty keen on the content (which seems to be the regular content that was here before + a fusion of stuff from Reddit)

I'm really not keen on having an influx of low quality Facebook posts here.

I'm not the one to be on my high horse, thinking that these platforms or Reddit are beacons of enlightenment, but the comments here are light-years above what I see on Facebook, so I want none of that.

@AnonymousLlama

@alyaza @dcormier @Ertebolle

75% of the posts I see on kbin are the worst low quality meme bullshit, significantly dumber and worse than the horrible stuff on Facebook.

You’re worried that, what? Itll get in the way of the trash everywhere already?

You need to curate your feed. That's not what I'm seeing.

It’s basically what happened after the revolutionary war, and reparations were even paid: to slave owners.

Well yeah, and the 3/5 clause was essentially a compromise whereby the disproportionately populous areas agreed to accept partial credit for the share of their population that was enslaved.

It’s ok to not tolerate algorithms that promote intolerance for clicks and advertising.

As much as I don't think the pact will do much, it's their right to defederate whichever instances they want. The protocol is still "open and interoperable" and this does not change that - in fact, this move is only possible because of that openness.

Your argument only sounds kinda sane when applied to Meta, but the same could be said about instances made by bad actors (spammers, for example). Please do further research before commenting on this.

What? Are you arguing tolerance of intolerance?

I'm arguing the protocol was designed this way for a reason. Each instance is meant to be able to implement their own policies and defederate who they want, exactly what Beehaw is doing here. The idea that this is against the spirit of the protocol is entirely inaccurate. Hope that clears it up.

I agree this seems kneejerk. If Meta refuses to abide by the standards of interoperability and openness then lock them out, but by doing so ahead of time the fediverse is committing the crime it's pre-punishing Meta for.

Regardless of how untrustworthy Meta as a company is, it also tends to hold the kinds of "mainstream" social media platforms that I have actively been avoiding for many reasons, including their communities. Beehaw has already defederated from other instances for having open sign-up and a disproportionately large number of users on them who needed moderation actions taken, and I can see a Meta-run instance posing the same kinds of problems.

Plus, like others said, it's not impossible to federate later if it ends up being an overreaction. It's just that Meta and its userbase already exist, so it's possible to make pre-emptive judgement with that knowledge and correct the judgement later, potentially avoiding a flood of unwanted content.

Thanks for the transparency. I personally think this is the right move. Meta shouldn't be trusted, based on their previous performance. If they do something to change that then we'll see, but I'm not expecting them to change their stripes.

Been catching up on all the NDA drama on Mastodon, it's really caused a rift between some users and instance admins. Felt a bit like an 'aww it's all grown up' moment to see Mastodon having a scandal.

Only good can come from shutting out corporate interests. Good on you ❤️

This is fantastic news and applaud this decision. I used to work in digital marketing and having seen how Facebook, (and Twitter, Google, etc.) makes their sausage and how they operate, I advise everyone get off Meta/FB, or really any centralized social media platform for that matter.

Good. To quote WarGames:

The only winning move is not to play

Meta is at best looking to profit from the Fediverse, and more likely looking to extinguish it. I think blocking them at the borders is the only solution.

Good choice, who wants to deal with a hundred thousand instagram users sitting in between every fediverse user.

I 100% agree with this decision. At first I wanted to give Meta a chance, just to get a big player in the Fediverse, but after reading this article it totally changed my views.

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.

I appreciate the work you all do. Im a heavier lurker than particpater and i see little fingers of you all taking care of beehaw for us all the time and it makes me smile 😁 good work everyone!

I hereby agree to block any instances owned by meta should they pop up on the fediverse.

I suggest to rephrase with this better: "I hereby agree to block any instances owned by, governed by, supported by mostly, funded by only or affiliated with Meta, its subsidiaries, major involving partners and influenced involving affiliates should they pop up on the Fediverse."

LEGAL DISCLAIMER: I do not provide my suggestion "as a legal advice" but as a thought to share that may be considered or configured by legal experts. I will not be held liable for any error that any revision upon or any derivative from my suggestion may cause.

This pact isn't legally binding, but more of a moral "I stand against Meta" thing

@xptiger @alyaza I don't know what it is about Legal disclaimers.. they seem kinda scary. Just reading "LEGAL DISCLAIMER" is enough for me to gulp and loosen the tie.

They sound very.. Legal.. and.. and Disclaimery.

Look at you, coming in with your legalese.

Godsspeed.

Good. There's no place for corporations on the fediverse. Specially not for a corporation like Meta that has shown time after time how dangerous they are.

I love this instance. Thank you so much guys, all this Meta stuff has been a bee in my bonnet. Forgive the pun.

Forgive the pun.

Forgive? It's encouraged! Bee yourself!

Nice, I got the vibes you'd do that without having to announce it but I'm glad to hear the commitment. Makes it easier to feel better about building connections here knowing they won't be thrown apart when Meta comes to town.

Personally speaking, I like announcements on these kinds of decision because it can show public support for the decision and help us in our conviction. It also allows people that don't agree to find a better place for them.

Definitely agree, I guess I was more just making a point that even without saying anything that's the vibe I was getting from this instance. Which was meant as a compliment. You folks are doing a great job so far 😊

Oh yeah, I didn't mean that I was disagreeing - it would be kinda weird for us to defederate from lemmy.world/sh.itjust.works because of lack of mod tools yet accept to try to moderate people from Facebook's Threads 🤣

I just like it as a vibe check of sort so I thought I'd add that thought!

Corporations will attempt to infiltrate anything they see as a threat to their profit margins. Long live the Fediverse. 😀

Fuck meta and fuck Facebook. No one wants this place to become like that dogshit site. Fully support defederating from any meta owned instances

You can't become a billionaire without being incredibly evil. They are literally working to kill off all life on the planet.

As for giving them the benefit of the doubt? Seriously? Anyone who suggests that has got to be getting a nice paycheck from the plutocrats.

War is coming. Thank you for taking a strong stance now rather than later.

Really pleased to hear this. I will be staying on Beehaw for the foreseeable future, I'm on the same page as the admins.

I'm not shure, there are a few good arguments against plain blocking of Meta.

This article is mostly against federating
https://privacy.thenexus.today/should-the-fediverse-welcome-surveillance-capitalism/

it does highlight contra's:

John Gruber describes the Anti-Meta Pact as "petty and deliberately insular" and suggests that the whole point of ActivityPub is to turn social networking into something more akin to email, which he describes as "truly open."1

Tristan Louis says "The anti-Meta #Fedipact can only achieve one thing: make sure that #ActivityPub loses to the Bluesky protocol."2

Dan Gillmor suggests that "preemptively blocking them -- and the people already using them -- from your instance guarantees less relevance for the fediverse."

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".

our priorities are not "fediverse first" or "ActivityPub first", they're Beehaw first.

Ok, that's where I'm in another camp, and that's ok, we can disagree on goals.

I think that largely the fediverse has drawn people that are against corporate control and want to go back to a more community-oriented system. I also think that there is a lot of cynicism and lack of trust in corporate social media that is growing with time.

For these reasons, I don't think that Bluesky or a corporate takeover is welcome and that people will switch over to it.

How can we promote open standards like activitypub while blocking anone else entry.

On meta this is difficult, any Non disclosure Agreement is evil, Everything has to be in the open. and considering the history of FB/meta i'm verry sceptical. But still, open standards, open discussion , i am a bit of an optimist.

Promoting interoperability does not mean accepting bad actors. We can build something without bad actors. They can use ActivityPub and use it with people who are fine with Facebook, people don't need to accept it though.

Just like we can encourage the usage of HTTP and the Web without hosting and giving place to all websites on another website. For example, I have a personal website and encourage people to do so. That doesn't mean I need to link and interact with all websites that exist.

Meta are already reaching out to fediverse devs and inviting them to secret NDA covered meetings.

Gruber's position is somewhere between 'internally inconsistent' and 'distressingly naive'; quote:

On point 2, I’m fine with starting Facebook with two strikes against it. Put them on a short leash. They start fucking around, Mastodon instances should start de-federating from their product.

So he agrees that the first time Facebook does anything wrong we should promptly de-federate from them, but somehow seems to think that they... won't? Facebook being allowed to federate is contingent on them being absolutely perfect model citizens, when Facebook have never been model citizens of any group they've ever participated in?

better to just keep growing slowly rather than having massive capital and quick improvements only to be killed later by Meta.

The goal of the fediverse was never to be "relevant" in corporate capital terms.

The goal was for us all to be able to use it.

Being embrace-extend-extinguished would not achieve what most of us are here for.

make sure that #ActivityPub loses to the Bluesky protocol

Like we're playing Team Deathmatch and have been placed on Team HashtagActivityPub so we've gotta do anything possible to beat Team Bluesky.

As someone who actually kinda likes protocols themselves, I still have to wonder why anyone would care about a protocol. Users don't use protocols. Users should not have to care about protocols, let alone fight over their "relevance" (which apparently is defined as "either it's the most popular one or it's NOTHING").

Also, why must everything be as big as humanly possible? Every single thing must be one enormous, monolithic pile of people. Can't we have a nice thing over here and just let Facebook "win" (which is kindof an asinine concept here) and be "the big one that 'everybody' uses?"

The idea that email is "truly open" demonstrates a ton of ignorance on this topic. Email is entirely controlled by like less than 20 large operators, who often completely ignore email from smaller servers.

Email is literally one of the worst examples of an open protocol. The fact that this person thinks for a second it is even comparable to ActivityPub in terms of openness should completely undermine their credibility in your mind.

I can host an email server. You can host an email server. Even if the big players choose not to accept mail from us, we can accept mail from each other.

I use sendmail notifications on every VM I host, and I use one of the "large operators" for my own email inboxes; I never have trouble getting messages from my VMs. The big players aren't blocking my little servers. Even if they did, they can only block the mailbox that they host. They don't host my VMs, and I am perfectly free to spin up my own mailbox to completely bypass their imposed limitations.

Contrast with a reddit, facebook, or twitter inboxes, which are entirely under the control of spez, zuck, and musk: they host (and thus control) both the sender and the receiver, as well as the path between them. Messages sent on their platforms are entirely at their whim.

Email is certainly an open protocol, and ActivityPub functions very similarly.

Even if the big players choose not to accept mail from us, we can accept mail from each other.

Yes, but my point was that those operators make up the vast majority of email accounts. Yes, all of your smaller servers can communicate with each other, but that doesn't matter when like 99.5% of the time, your target recipient will NOT be another small server.

Yes, email and ActivityPub are both decentralized, but that's about where the similarities end. Email, as a decentralized protocol, has been an abject failure. It is well known that big players DO actively block email from smaller servers often. Your individual experience is irrelevant. (For more details, see the thread at https://twitter.com/cfenollosa/status/1566484145446027265?lang=en)

Meta was one of the killers of democracy. No one should ever affiliate with it.

Thank you!!!! Say NO to META's disregard of privacy!!!

I don’t know if I have a settled opinion for or against defederating from Meta instances, but I know enough to say I absolutely respect the decision to.

I may appreciate more exposure to federating social media, but I also appreciate that Meta has a problematic track record. Besides, my shifting away from Reddit has me realizing that juggling accounts is not as difficult as I thought. If I end up having a reason to get on a Meta instance, it wouldn’t be an issue to make a compatible handle that can communicate there.

Glad to hear it. Over the years, Meta has shown that they don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. They’d have to prove themselves, which I suspect they are able (but 100% not willing) to do.

@alyaza I am conflicted on this. While I feel like it's probably the right thing to do as Meta would just destroy the fediverse if it entered it, it makes me uncomfortable that this network that is supposed to be so open and connected with each other can be so easily and glibly made into what is essentially yet another privately controlled website.

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

As someone else on kbin I'm really hoping Ernest will enter this pact too.

Meta's "embrace extend extinguish" is a threat to us all.

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.

This has always been the reason I don't believe in distributed models of social media. Federation also means defederation and that's good.

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

I've seen a lot of sentiment shifting positively for Facebook (I refuse to call it meta) over the past few months and I find it kind of unnerving. Mostly outside of tech/journalism circles. Maybe it's just that standing next to Twitter, Facebook has looked a lot prettier lately or something but I don't understand how anyone can forget all the malicious evils Facebook has been and brought onto us. Could the name change have really bamboozled people into giving them a clean slate?

I'm all in on holding the line against them taking over the fediverse, glad to see the energy and I hope we keep it.

Look at what they are doing with Mark Zuckerberg. Their big PR campaign to show him as a mans man. Posting that he did the Murph challenge, talking about ju jit su, and accepting Elon's ridiculous challenge for a cage match.

There is this fairly obvious PR campaign to make him seem less like a emotionless robot.

What about twitters project?

Twitter's project? You mean Jack Dorsey's BlueSky? It doesn't do ActivityPub - it's not part of the fediverse

It is federated, but I forgot it wasn’t activitypub.

It's decentralised and open-source, but not federated, as it works on its own isolated protocol (similar to Matrix)

Matrix is also federated... having your own protocol is not related to the concept of federation, which is simply the property of having the ability to run your own servers and join a network of other servers which share a protocol.

Yes ,and no.

It depends on how you define both terms. If decentralised = federated, matrix is federated. But if federation is defined as a model of social network in which different servers based on different platforms interact through the use of the same protocol(S) (decentralisation + interoperability), being isolated, Matrix doesn't fit the definition.

Because Matrix doesn't accept other platforms to enter its protocol, nor plans on adding it's commonly not considered to be truly federated

Matrix does. There's multiple different projects that implement Matrix's protocols: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/servers/

Those are still Matrix (platform) style servers.

You don't have something like Mastodon vs Pixelfed vs Lemmy in terms of diversity of products.

Those all speak ActivityPub.

But if you want to put some weird UI to say that it's federated (which is not necessary to be a federated service). You have Cerulean : https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/18/introducing-cerulean/

I know they are ActiVItyPub based. I'm talking about the diversity of platforms, not which protocol they use.

that it’s federated (which is not necessary to be a federated service).

What do you mean by this?

I truly do t understand why so many people in the fediverse are so willing to "give meta a chance". Why?! Why would would get closer to the limbs ripping machine just because they painted it a different color?

Every single Zuckerberg social media venture had "raze everyone else to the ground" as a step, but you think this one won't?? This time the leopard won't eat our faces?!

How do we even know that they're not already running instances? Why would they start announcing it, especially after the response?

This has to do with Project92, not just with Facebook hosting Mastodon instances. I wouldn't put it past them to discretely host instances to gather data, but we can't see them, and therefore we can't defend against them (and mass-defederation of potential instances is a recipe for disaster).

let them create there's and lets see what happens. I do not like meta but i like their open source projects like react and lexical. if they do any unethical stuff we can just not use them.

This is great, I don't think federating with Meta will benefit the admins' mission with this instance much at all.

The link to the pact nearly blinded me. Animated falling hearts and bright pink background. For a minute there I thought I travelled back in time to the 90's. Also I hasten to add that everyone blocking Meta seems like quite an unfederated thing to do. That said I hate Meta, block 'em.

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.

Good on them. Always imagine it was Reddit pulling this move.

Refusing to federate with Meta servers is practically a no-brainer anyways.

Nobody really wants brain-dead facebook users on the fediverse anyways.^1^

1 > This, of course, doesn't include anyone owning a facebook account out of necessity who also has the technical knowledge to register and conduct themselves appropriately on the Fediverse in general.