Everyone is talking about how Meta is trying to Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish the Fediverse. Meta won’t be alone for long in this goal, there will be a lot of capitalist actors that would try to do the same in the long run.
Defederation with them will be a shot in the leg, and handicap the Fediverse movement itself. There will be users/instances in the current Fediverse that would want to federate with them, and banning such instances would create silos and echo chambers.
The way out of this is to focus on the 2nd E - “Extend”. I think we can all agree that UX of Threads app will always probably be the best out of all the federated instances. But that is something that people can still live without. Before long, Meta will tout shortcomings like lack of E2E encryption in the private messages and some other core features, that will create a bigger divide amongst ourselves. The Fediverse developers and community have to keep abreast of Meta on such core features, so that they can never extend the core of the Fediverse.
Let me know of your thoughts!
A for-profit and a non-profit silos existing along each other might suffice. The resources and goals of the for-profit one shouldn’t dictate what the non-profit community of developers, admins and users, a lot of which are volunteers do. We can’t match either and we probably shouldn’t.
It seems likely that some instances will federate and others will not. I think eventually, many people who hate Meta might move to the instances that federated with Meta, just so that they can find people on their social graph.
I’m afraid, that’s when silo of the defederated instances will become echo chambers, especially if they do second order blocking as some have threatened to do with mastodon.social