This whole controversy irritates the fuck out of me, because it's driven by assholes who either don't grasp the nature of the fediverse or are willfully misrepresenting it.

By design, there are no mechanisms by which Meta can be prevented from owning an instance, and there are no mechanisms by which the fediverse as a whole can respond in any particular way. That's not a bug - it's a feature.

The exact idea behind the fediverse is that centralized authority is ultimately harmful, and that a social media network can manage without it, through the carrot and stick of federation/defederation.

So anyone who wants to start an instance can (which necessarily includes Meta). That's not an ideal or a policy - it's a fact. There's literally no way for anyone to stop anyone else from starting an instance.

And every instance owner can decide whether or not to federate with any other instance.

And every individual can decide which instance(s) they want to join or follow.

And that's it. That's the whole deal, right there.

The whole idea behind the ActivityPub protocol is that those things are sufficient to establish and maintain a healthy ecosystem. And ALL anyone can do at this point is wait and see if that works out to be true or not. There's literally nothing else anyone can do.

So all of this sturm und drang is just pointless, emotive nonsense. It's fear and hostility that cannot possibly have any bearing on anything. The system is already in place and events are already unfolding and it's all going to play out however it does and all of your hand-wringing abd fear-mongering and anger and demands mean NOTHING. They're just divisive noise.