Everywhere I look there are people advocating for defederation from this and that! Do you even understand what you're suggesting? Do you get what's the point of decentralized social media and activity pub?
This is supposed to be free and accessible for everyone. We all have brains and can decide who to interact with.
If meta or any other company manages to create a better product it's just natural that people tend to use it. I won't use it, you may not use it and it's totally fine! It's about having options. Also as Mastodon's CEO pointed out there's no privacy concern, everything stays on your instance.
Edit: after reading and responding to many comments, I should point out that I'm not against defederation in general. It's a great feature if used properly. Problem is General Instances with open sign-ups and tens of thousands of users making decisions on par of users and deciding what they can and can not see.
If you have a niche or small community with shared and agreed upon values, defederating can be great. But I believe individual users are intelligent enough to choose.
I was going to ask “don’t you want to try to bring people over to your point of view for the sake of building a social consensus?” and then I remember that you called those people “dictators” so I guess not.
At this point I'm getting bad vibes from you TBH! I've expressed my opinion and apparently some people find it compelling and some disagree, that's fine!
And as someone who has family that had to escape the Soviet Union, I don’t respect your opinion that what they went through is “exactly the same” as making an account on a different instance!
And as someone who lived most of my life under an authoritarian regime, I don't respect your advocation for censorship. If you knew the effect of thinking you know better than anyone and can decide for them, you would never make such comments.
And as someone who cares about the meanings of words, I don’t agree with you that defederarion is censorship, especially to the point of insisting it’s literally exactly the same as government censorship of its citizens!