I guess I don't understand why we would be lenient with a corporation that has actively destroyed the modern internet for profits, blatantly violates user privacy, etc etc.

The topic of defederation seems to really make people want to break out their soap boxes to talk about open access and free love, despite you know... the real world being real, and corpos willing to shit on your good thing for a few bucks.

Ask yourself, in three years from now will you be thinking "it's so nice how Meta lets me follow and interact with their enormous userbase for free, without advertising, using my own open source server and frontend"?

Remember that's the basic expectation today for a participant in the fediverse. If this feels implausible, doing anything else is very incompatible with the fediverse's existing values.

The problem isn't just that it's Meta, it's any situation where a much larger actor comes in with different motivations. Today we have a small number of users whose servers are almost exclusively run on a "community service" model. Meta is an advertising business. They are much bigger and will define the fediverse if allowed in. If we allow them to connect, it should be much later after organic growth which means we can assimilate them properly and deflect any bad behaviour.

What might happen if Meta throws their weight around? I can predict at least three outcomes

• Proprietary variations to ActivityPub, probably starting with something that seems "understandable" like moderation reasons.
• Certain new features get centralised on Meta's servers only (e.g. search) claiming that it's for efficiency in the distributed environment.
• Claiming spam problems, require individual instance operators or their users to verify themselves with Meta to enable federation.

The question in my mind is whether their intention is to destroy the competition, or keep the fediverse alive as a way to claim that they are not a technical monopoly that needs to be broken up by regulators, in the same way that Google provides most of the funding for Firefox.

Mozilla expects to generate more than $500M in revenue this year | TechCrunch

The Mozilla Foundation today released its financial report for 2020. As usual, this gives us a good picture of the organization’s financial health from a year ago, but for the first time this year, Mozilla also provided us with more recent data.

^{Frederic Lardinois (TechCrunch)}

If you block all of Meta just because they’re Meta, not only do you punish countless potential valued contributors who have done no wrong,

Bullshit. There's no "punishment" whatsoever. Those users are free to open accounts on fediverse servers at any time.

you also embolden Meta to engage with the Fediverse in less legitimate, more underhanded ways.

You mean like anointing a few heads of big instances as representatives of fedi and trying to get them to sign NDAs? Shit like that?

Let’s focus on building affirmatively and consciously the community we want

This is literally the point of pre-emptive blocking. Meta is an existential threat to the quality of this place, period point blank.

People, individual people, built Fedi out of nothing. It's our party, we quite like it, and we can pre-disinvite entities with an enormous track record of shitty behavior whenever we want.

If you want to interact with such entities and the typical user that comes with, by all means, find servers that federate. It will drive a netsplit, and that sucks, but it's also working as intended.

I just hope SDF is on the right side of the split. Fuck Facebook and every single thing they stand for.