mastodon.ar.al is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
This is my personal fediverse server.

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I love it. There’s a poll ongoing about whether folks would ban a Meta (Instagram/Facebook) instance and people are like “well, I’d give them the benefit of the doubt.”

I really have no words.

Is it learned helplessness? Stockholm Syndrome? Masochism? Something else?

I just don‘t get it.

And here’s what’s saddest: the question itself is moot.

Because mastodon.social wouldn’t block it.

Instead, we’d hear about how Meta joining the fediverse is a Good Thing™.

This would be about a year or so before Meta or some other major instance with major Silicon Valley money displaces mastodon.social as the primary fediverse instance.

At which point maybe a certain someone will realise that legitimising Big Tech-style scale and centralisation is a silly strategy when you’re not Big Tech.

@aral I also believe it's a good thing. At first we have to see how they join. In what way and how much they are compatible to the services we use. It could end up like lemmy, where you can find the posts if you search for them but they wont show up in your timeline.
Other than that, yes, it will be a competition. We still should welcome them. We're not the hateful fediverse that hates everything new.

@fabiscafe Yes, let’s see how the trillion-dollar, publicly-traded mass surveillance machine joins. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they’ve changed.

Sheep who can’t recognise a wolf are destined to become its dinner.

@aral They'll do the same thing as they always did. Still - we, as the fediverse, need to learn to deal with them outside of fediblock. We want to grow, we want to normalize interaction between services.
If we start this by blocking hugh services with "normal" people, because the provider sucks, we're going in the same direction like they did once.