@dalereardon That's not the only way to look at it though. When mastodon.social federates with Threads, that will potentially create risks for instances that federate with mastodon.social even if they block Threads -- there's a simple example here. So it's very reasonable for other instances to say "if you're doing something that may put people on our instance (or their data) at risk we're going to prioritize their safety and defederate from you."
"the purpose of The Pact is to embolden instances to commit to blocking project92/barcelona/threads. a lotta peeps were already talking bout preemptively blocking it since the march leaks, me included. and the idea popped into my head that maybe if we had like, y'know, a thingy peeps could sign to show their support for it... it might weaken that argument that it's like pointless or whatever, and might make that choice easier to make"
And it very much succeeded at that! Of course she was also clear that this wasn't why others signed the Pact, and many people pushing for defederating Threads (whether or not they signed the pact) articulated a whole range of reasons. For example in Consent and the fediverse@onepict says
"By supporting the fedipact we are signalling that we don't consent to interacting with a known abusive actor who revels in their power."
@misc it would be interesting to see some of the descriptions that framed it as coervice. Maybe they were reacting to statements that were phrased in a coercive way, which would also be interesting to see. But it wouldn't surprise me if they were projecting something into it that wasn't really there. This happens a lot -- @welshpixie's Toxic Manosphere of Fedi links out to an example where an instance admin asserting a boundary as a "bully", and @oliphant's Defederating Universeodon has an example where a different instance admin describes defederation as "abuse". So it's quite possible that people initially describing the FediPact as "coercion" were similarly mischaracterizing it, and then others just repeated that description without checking it.
Wraithe
onepict