I agree that Meta will attempt to EEE Fediverse. I don’t think that they’re a positive actor in this space at all.
But, the move to defeat them isn’t to try to implement a blockade. There simply isn’t any way to ensure that everyone would comply and the people that don’t block Meta services will have access to billions of more potential users while the instances that do block Meta will find themselves as a backwater part of the Fediverse that the majority of the people on the planet cannot access from their existing social media account.
Right now Lemmy is made up of motivated and ideological people who were willing to leave Reddit because of the way it was being run. Having this group isolated from the networks that Meta is connected to is a positive thing for Meta. You would have all of the people who would be motivated to work against Meta’s interests cut off in an isolated pocket of the Fediverse unable to affect Meta.
Open software doesn’t have the userbase to strong arm Meta in this manner. The way you win is you outrun the Extend portion of the plan by creating software extensions that operate better than what Meta offers and use that to lure users off of Meta’s services. This is made massively easier by them being part of the same federated network. You’re no longer working against the Network Effect… users are unwilling to swap to new platforms because they lose access to their existing friends and content that they follow. This doesn’t happen if your instance is federated with Meta services… users can freely swap if the experience is better.
Yeah, blocking is bad. It’s bad when Google does it and it would be bad if we did it.
I still use XMPP based chat services, Google’s move in this area doesn’t affect me at all because the protocol is open. ActivityPub is the same way… if Meta decides that they’re going to block all non-Meta instances then our instance isn’t affected. But as long as they’re federating with us then their users can freely switch to non-Meta services without losing access to their existing friends and communities. That would not be true if we defederated from Meta.
Beating Meta has to be done by providing a better service, not by taking a tiny percentage of their population and hiding in a bubble on the Fediverse. Meta already has the user base, they’re not worried about losing a few million users (especially ones who’re ideologically motivated to oppose them).
The best move at this point is to stay federated and to rapidly update ActivityPub to provide more features. We have to out-Extend them, we cannot prevent the ‘Embrace’ part of the strategy… the existing Fediverse userbase is too small compared to Meta’s users base.