I don’t have much to add to the Meta vs. the fediverse debate beyond what John Gruber has written about. Big platforms using open APIs is a good thing! Much better than closed silos and locked-down APIs. I don’t trust Facebook either, but preemptively blocking them is shooting ourselves in the foot.

@manton 💯 - then again - if people in the wider fediverse want to engage with the meta world - people might abandon the premptive blockers and move to instances that are not -- the people will ultimately decide - even though the instances might THINK they are in power.

@manton 💯 As much as I think Facebook should be marginalized, that is not the goal. We should all work hard to reach the people that Facebook currently has locked away. Openness is the best way to do that. The more people realize there’s more to the social Internet than Facebook the better.

@fgtech @manton Exactly. For many people, Facebook = Internet (just like AOL was for many). Once they see the world outside FB, maybe they will leave FB?

@manton so long as the finger is on the trigger at the first sign of “embrace, extend, extinguish”

@manton blocking it as a whole is not the way to go, but at least providing ways for users to do it on their own, IMHO, is the best.

@rom I think those users can always join instances that have blocked the Meta instance. Or, if you are so inclined, you can have your own instance and block it instead of relying on a random admin. Of course, it gets more inconvenient and difficult

@pratik you see this sounds easy but the effort it takes says otherwise. I don’t know about other ActivityPub-compliant software, but Mastodon has that feature to be private and to unlist posts. I know Wordpress and Micro.blog have it as an all or nothing setting.

@pratik this is akin to saying, if you don’t agree with Google and Apple on how they control their platform, build your own.

@rom Well, some or rather lots of people use Linux. And yes, being against the establishment is difficult otherwise everyone would be.

@pratik haha true that, but then again - wrt Meta, fool me once…

@rom I agree about Meta. I just hope the people on there can see and use the fediverse without too much friction and then maybe some of them may quit Meta

@manton it seems the important work is to figure out how to block ads (preferably in the protocol, but otherwise if not)

@toddgrotenhuis It’s not clear yet if ads will even federate outside Meta, or if they’ll just be inside Meta’s app. We’ll see!