People forget. They go for convenience. That is how we ended up in our present state. Facebook led efforts against net neutrality too in some countries. But how many know/remember that? Amongst all other things they did.

I'm more concerned of them integrating new features and bullying everyone else into following to integrate them or else.

I don't exactly understand how this is going to kill small instances? I just stared with the Fediverse stuff so I might have understood it wrong:

Point 1: "Meta will unethically defederate from instances..." I'm assuming that means they'll block access to those instances for anyone that has an account on the Meta instance? I don't really see the problem with that. This won't affect small instances at all because people who want to view other instances will have an account somewhere else and people using the meta instance probably wouldn't have heard of the fediverse in the first place if it wasn't for meta. Its a win basically since they'll get introduced to the fediverse concept which is a step in the right direction. And small instances will stay as they are which is unaffected.

Point 2: If I understood it correctly they can only slow down access to other instances if one uses an account created on the meta instance? So same argument as in point 1.

What a huge piece of FUD this is. Threads is already way larger then the Fediverse is. They don't need to come here and try and take users. You are afraid that Meta will hoard the content and users from the Fediverse but they are already doing that. Threads doesn't connect now so it's all there's. Why would they connect to just disconnect later? Why is the answer to being afraid of getting disconnected in the future to never connect? This makes no sense. It's complete fear mongering.

They’ll probably get mad that people can take their ball and go home by going to another instance without ads and signing away access to all of their personal data but get the same content. If they defederate, to me that’s the trash taking itself out.

I guess this will already have been said, but nonetheless:

I like the feeling of community as it is right now in the Fediverse very much.

Most of me hopes that it will not successfully federate with Meta, ever; or if it "must", in a way that will be mostly irrelevant to me (communities I wouldn't subscribe to in the first place, anyway).

I don't see how that, in turn, would give Meta any control over the parts of the Fediverse that I care about. If they want to join and contribute in good faith, fine. If not, also fine. Why should it change anything for Fediverse "centered" communities?

I never cared about size or majority, but about quality of content and discourse. And I find that in those points, the current Fediverse much outshines anything else I've seen (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, ...) in the last decade or so.

This post feels like fearmongering...

Why would Meta care about small instances? I feel like Meta would only see the big instances as pontential threat.

Honestly, this could actually be an opportunity for fediverse. I don't want Meta to harvest my data, so I would never make an account there. However I am interested in content/people from Meta and I can follow that from fediverse. I believe there is large group of people who think the same way and they may join fediverse if they haven't already done that.

"unethically defedrate"? I think you may have misunderstood how federation works, since "defederate" is just another word for "ban yourself from seeing that instance's content", if Threads defederate from a small Mastodon instance, for example, that Mastodon instance can still see all the content on Threads, but the Threads user won't be able to see anything posted by that Mastodon instance.

Also, any instance can and should be able to federate and defederate any other instance for any or even no reason, that's the entire point.

I think meta will dominate the space that federates with it. Hopefully none of my instances will do that... And I will be unaffected.

I think you are wildly overestimating the stickiness of the fediverse. The sorts of people who will prefer Threads are going to prefer Threads whether or not it's federated. On the other hand, the sorts of people who prefer the fediverse will never switch to Threads even if it becomes the smoothest experience ever. But the latter cohort is likely much, much smaller than the former.

I am not worried about this. I think threads is going to end up like all the fascist instances. Perhaps they will have more users... Good for them. But the rest of us will defederate and they will become an isolated instance. Which begs the question, why use activity pub at all? I suppose maybe its so they can run multiple servers themselves and piggy back on the infrastructure that was laid down for free. As long as most of us defederate its not going to change much. You could get about as much data scraping timelines now as they could siphon up with federating. So small instances will continue to federate with each other and that will end up being a smaller amount of the people using the fediverse. The only way this matters is if we obsess about numbers. But honestly most of us can't afford to run a big instance anyway, so obsessing about unattainable numbers is pointless. It doesn't change the economics at all, it doesn't change the fact that small instances will federate with each other and not stuff we don't like. It may change the privacy stuff, which is something we can fix with some vigilance.

I agree. Ultimately, I think there is a real chance that there ends up being 2 major fediverses. One that is federated with Meta, and one that is not.

I think that those joined to meta will ultimately become like the losers table in a school cafeteria. They can hear all of the conversations, but nobody will engage them. I’d rather be in the not-federated camp.

Compared to Meta, all other instances are small.

What is the motivation for this post? Did Meta announce they will be making an instance or is the OP just thinking ahead?

Is there a list of instances that have defederated (or announced they will) from Threads?

I seriously don't understand this mindset! If meta manages to make a better product it will definitely have more users, it's just how everything works!

Users will have the option to pick between convince of meta or freedom of smaller instances. Who are we to decide for everyone?