So Meta appears to be making an ActivityPub play [1]. I want to go on record about this, in two ways:

1. Meta has dramatically - like, at least two orders of magnitude - more development labor to throw at this issue. If this software is easier to use or more intuitive to you than Mastodon, Akkoma, Calkey, etc, it's worth taking a moment to acknowledge that this is probably why - and if it's a janky mess, well, that's going to be very funny.

2. This is an Embrace, Extend, Extinguish [2] play, baldfacedly. It's incumbent upon instances whose users are committed to decentralization to at *least* silence, and preferably suspend, corporate takeover attempts like this.

If you care more about reach than decentralization, that's fine; it's a personal choice that someone might make for any number of very valid reasons. I would ask that those of us who *are* ideologically motivated in this way not harass others who can't or don't make that decision.

But.

I would also ask people to kindly refrain from ranting about how ~unreasonable~ it is for Fediverse old-timers to shun corporate ActivityPub instances. Many of us are in this game because we want to see a future where all internet discourse isn't filtered through a half-dozen corporate moderation panels, and we are willing - and able - to make choices based on that.

There is also likely to be a *lot* of spam and bad discourse from that direction, so even if you're not ideologically motivated to avoid corporate nonsense, you might want to.

Thanks.

---

1: Lia Haberman, "ICYMI: Instagram's New App Could Be Here By June " on Stubstack. Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20230519155758/https://liahaberman.substack.com/p/icymi-instagrams-new-app-could-be

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish