pyrex

@crashdoom @brodokk

From an outcome-oriented perspective, federating has little effect, positive or negative. Meta does not care about furry.engineer. furry.engineer is unlikely to receive not receive horrible content from Meta. Meta will benefit in small ways from being federated with furry.engineer and pawb.social because furry.engineer and pawb.social have very good content.

But on a more universal level – that is, if you imagine that everyone bridges to Meta – Meta benefits massively from being allowed to connect to the existing good content across the Fediverse. From this point of view, allowing Meta to bridge to furry.engineer is a bit like littering – yes, you’re not killing the planet yourself, and other people are responsible for far greater harm, but in aggregate people who do what you are making the planet a worse place to live in.

If you do not see that as an ethical problem, then blocking them would be a performative gesture. Even if you see blocking them as a performative gesture, I still think pawb.social and furry.engineer should do so.

Being federated with them implies that furry.engineer tolerates their online conduct. IMHO, furry.engineer has no exit from this: when you endorse someone while also disclaiming that you do not _really_ endorse them, you are still endorsing them. An individual real person with a track record like Meta’s would not be allowed to interact with furry.engineer.

On the other hand, not federating with Meta would make furry.engineer part of a collective action that sends the explicit message is that Meta is intolerable. The impact is still negligible, but in the same sense that the impact of eating less beef is negligible: by taking the action you are embodying positive characteristics and if the action was universalized, everyone’s lives would be improved. Unlike “eating less beef,” taking this action has no real cost to you.

I’ll add that the only real solution to the coordination problem in organized action is for people to take actions even when they can’t guarantee they will get the outcome they want. It’s very important for groups with rational, apolitical branding to take actions like this because otherwise people won’t act like this in daily life. This is the kind of moral thinking people need to be babystepped into if you want them to refuse to do unethical things just because their bosses told them to, or if you want them to demand raises that are commensurate to inflation.

Not only is it ethical to think this way, but people actually benefit personally by going beyond what they can justify with a mere cost/benefit analysis and taking a leap of faith when their moral compass tells them what to do, and what they deserve.

I cannot imagine federating with Meta given these tradeoffs and given what I know about the kind of social consciousness good engineers must develop to be effective in their careers.