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. :)
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Both to an extent. It would cause some fragmentation, but you can still have open fragmented islands.
I personally don’t like the idea of blocking and cutting off myself and other users from an instance because of an ideological disagreement, but I understand why others do think that it is important or even imperative to do this to prevent certain ideologies from being given a platform. I think that the difference in opinion of how to enact a federation policy comes down to a difference in values, and so this is a difficult topic to discuss and agree on.
Defederating on ideological grounds closes the network a little, but you still often have many instances that can serve as bridges to connect the nodes, and people can happily live in those bridges and interact with the network in the way they see fit.
What is being suggested with the idea of blocking not only Meta but also anyone who federates with them is to destroy those bridges connecting the Meta island to the fedi island. So, the idea is to fully isolate them, and to achieve that by forcing the would-be ‘bridges’ to pick a side.
What is the next step? If someone defederates with Meta but doesn’t defederate with everyone who still federates with meta, will they be cut off too? This is a very strong forced fragmentation approach.
Now it is Meta, and this unique and specific event would not have the effect to fully obliterating the concept of an open network in my eyes, but it would close it off a bit and set a precedent. Creating a culture in the fediverse in which we can push each other to defederate as we please by threatening defederation is to me moving away from an open and decentralized network. As for me, I prefer to live in the open sea of those of us who prefer to keep our doors more open even if that means that we don’t get to play with the bigger fragments that choose to close off into their islands.