I have huge respect for Jon Gruber - especially after his brave and empathetic talk on the many harms of public shaming ("Cancel Culture") - so I'm going to take some time to unpack this.
I agree with the core point of Jon's piece. The Anti-Fedi Meta Pact (as I prefer to call it) is poor strategy. In ways made clear by Jon's response. It's also a failure of solidarity with the people who will populate Meta's servers, and will be trapped there if the Pact campaign succeeds.
"anti-corporate/anti-commercial" is a false equivalence. I believe corporations must be abolished to protect life on Earth. I'm also starting a co-op to offer commercial fedi hosting.
The most important objections to Meta's entry into the verse are not "anti-commercial", but anti-abuse, anti-surveillance, and pro-effective-moderation, which we know is impossible on servers the size they are proposing.
So let's remove that red herring and restate Jon's question;
"Is the goal of the Fediverse to be anti-corporate, or to be pro-openness?"
There's no doubt in my mind that the answer is "both".
It may still be the wrong question, or at least can be phrased differently to highlight a key aspect.
I think in general the fedizen population are all pro-openness. But what's at stake with an unbridled corporate takeover leads to asking the question:
"Is the #Fediverse open to business-as-usual i.e. #hypercapitalism? Or does it favor and is protective of a pathway that leads us towards a #postgrowth economy?"
@strypey IMO the goal of the fediverse doesn’t really exist, or rather “the fediverse does not exist as one entity”: personal difference differs, and so some people believe in openness, and others believe in safe space, these are all valid positions. Anyways, the fediverse seems to mostly get users (haven't necessarily bought into the concept) by Twitter/Reddit’s pushes, it does not pull in many users by itself, and that is the main problem.
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