I appreciate the push to be more analytical. I thought that I was being analytical, but this challenge to my thinking has made me realize that I’ve not been thorough.

Edit: speaking of thorough, I missed including the founding principles of privacy-centric and ad-free. That would seem to disqualify Meta right out of the gate, just as most people seem to prefer.

Ethically, it would seem that admins are limited by that, although I suppose technically, they should wait and see what an instance does before making the decision to defederate.

Anyway, here’s what I came up with should anyone decide to depart from the founding principles.

What our root concerns? I could be wrong but I think they are advertising, accuracy, and civility. Some people are concerned about sheer volume of new entrants, but I don’t know enough about fediverse architecture and tooling to address that concern.

Accuracy and civility are both moderation problems that the fediverse has to deal with whether Meta joins or not. Yes, there may be issues of scale and volume, but if the fediverse is to go mainstream, those problems need to be solved anyway.

There are forms of advertising that I think we could all live with in moderate amounts, but surveillance ads and malware have pretty much destroyed any tolerance for ads.

Okay, so how would ads get distributed in the fediverse?

1. Any instance could push ads of any type, in any volume to anyone registered on that instance. Any instance could collect data from anyone registered on that instance for serving surveillance ads on that instance or for direct sale to data brokers.
2. Any instance could push ads to anyone who subscribed to communities hosted on that instance, but would be severely limited in data collection without data sharing agreements between instances.
3. Anyone accessing an instance via web page could be served ads, including surveillance ads, whether logged in or not.
4. Anyone using a fediverse client could be served ads by that client, including surveillance ads.

1 through 4 are all instance-specific and can be avoided by any user who wishes to. There will always be nooks and crannies inside the fediverse that are free of ads and surveillance. The very existence of the fediverse is evidence that there is a critical mass of people to keep those spaces alive.

5, the client, has nothing to do with any instance or, in a sense, the fediverse. Clients can always do what a client wants. It’s up to individuals to choose wisely.

So what are the potential benefits? If Meta comes it at Meta scale, then anyone currently using both Meta properties and the fediverse might be able to keep the value of both while using only a single platform. If people using a Meta property follow Meta into the fediverse, that can increase the variety of communities and make very niche communities viable.

My take is that the fediverse can cope with an entity like meta because nobody is forced to join their instance or interact with anything or anyone hosted on Meta.

There are a couple of caveats:

1. As previously noted, I don’t know enough about fediverse architecture and tooling to assess the risk of a very large influx of people over a very short period of time.
2. If “embrace, extend, extinguish” is truly a concern, then I think being vigilant with respect to “extend” will prevent “extinguish.”