Yes. We should avoid them like the plague.

Yes, because we already know exactly how this is going to go. Their need to constantly make more and more money means that we know TODAY what is going to happen: EEE. We know this because of Fark, Digg, now Reddit, and to a lesser extent Slashdot and StackOverflow. The profiteers aren’t interested in federating, or having well-run communities; they’re interested in money and nothing else. We know for an absolute fact that Meta needs to make money and they’re only interested in the Fediverse because they see money in it (quite simply: because if they didn’t they wouldn’t be).

I completely get “we shouldn’t strike pre-emptively” but if you wait until the third E it’s too late. But we already know it’s not pre-emptive because they’ve already enshittified their own communities. Ever tried scrolling through Arsebook recently without FBP and uBlock Origin? Article - article - ad. Article - article - ad. One item in fucking THREE is crap you’re not interested in. That’s what they want to force onto the Fediverse. We know it today. We have seen what they have done to their own stuff. So when they come sniffing round here we are completely justified in slamming the door in their face even if they promise to be nice this time, because we already know what they want.

“Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” and you don’t have to look far. The influx of people into the Fediverse is directly caused by the profit-motivated enshittification of Reddit. If we don’t draw the line here then we have to retreat back from Lemmy and invent something else, which they will then want to enshittify.

“Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”

Companies like Meta poison everything they touch. They are a deeply evil, psychopathic organization. They are responsible for causing extremely harmful runaway effects in human society that I’m not even sure are possible to fix. The very reason for Lemmy’s recent popularity is that people are fed up with the “if something is free, you aren’t the user, you are the product” situation and its consequences (see Reddit vs. /u/spez).

Their intent to federate is a blatantly obvious attempt at an “embrace, extend, extinguish” strategy - I’m surprised anyone seriously considers federating with them. They need users to solve the “chicken and egg” problem and joining the fediverse would be an easy way for them to populate their service with content. Their motivations are obviously and transparently malicious and self-serving. They don’t care about the goals and values of the fediverse at all, all they see is an easy way to gain initial users and content. At the first moment federation will be more inconvenient than useful to them, after they sucked all the profit they could out of it, they will drop the entire thing like a hot potato, and we will be left in the dust.

I personally like this instance very much, and I’ve been putting hours and hours of work into building the AUAI community since the day I joined. But I wouldn’t hesitate for a second before deleting my account and never looking back if the community here decided to federate with Meta.

EDIT: another explanation of why they want to join the fediverse

I’m already a day late and I haven’t actually read all the comments because they’re surprisingly a lot here. But here is my two cents, hopefully I’m not just repeating someone else.

Do you want the fediverse to be as big as possible? Or do you want it to grow in a steady manner in a healthy way with healthy discussion?

Letting on the garbage that is popular social media giants like meta, will completely and utterly overwhelm this community. They have millions of users, we have thousands. Every single one of our posts will be drowned out by them. Say goodbye to high quality discourse, we will just become what Twitter and Facebook turned into, the same way that Reddit is going.

I do not care if we have millions of users, our higher bar of Discovery and usability means that we get people who are self-motivated to learn, learn about technology, learn about our culture, learn about our rules.

Would it be nice if it was easier to discover/join the fediverse? Sure. Would it be nice if we had millions of users? Sure. But I want to grow carefully and sustainably. I would rather have a small or medium-sized community with healthy discourse, than a worldwide gigantic social media community where conspiracy theories reign supreme, and the less techy people don’t understand how threads are different from Lemmy, and are constantly cross posting and are confused about what they’re looking at.

I can block meta communities myself, but I can’t block all the hordes of people that will jump on our threads. This is a scalability problem waiting to happen, this is a social discourse problem waiting to happen.

Lastly the only reason that I could possibly imagine that Zuckerberg wants to federate is to keep the only viable alternative to monopolistic social media conglomerates in check. The more people that can talk to us through his platform, the less people will look into and join us. If they can assert their monopolistic practices on the fediverse, they could use the EEE model to make it irrelevant. He is trying to destroy the federated social networks before they are big enough to be a real threat.

TLDR; YES.

They are just trying to pull an EEE(Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) on fediverse. Federating with Thr*ads is just putting a shotgun at the mount. Just see how Google killed XMPP