I get it, Meta has done some shit. But on the other hand, having such a big player in the Fediverse could be huge for its growth

Isn’t that exactly how “embrace, extend, extinguish” works? Meta’s huge numbers and publicity means that once it joins the Fediverse it will become the Fediverse, by sheer mass. Every other instance will be not even be a blip on the radar compared to theirs.

We get exactly one chance to refuse and it’s here, at the start.

What is even their saving grace? Publicity? People will only see “Meta” and “Facebook” plastered everywhere. And you know they’ll use their instance to archive and analyze everything, and build fake profiles, and cross-match them to Whatsapp and Facebook and Instagram, and push their algorithms to generate the top posts they want, and so on and so forth.

Meta/Facebook/Zuckerberg have done some of the most vile stuff to privacy. They’ve preyed on the personal data of billions of people. If there was such a thing as privacy genocide they’d be guilty of it.

This is like getting into the pool with a big hungry shark with syphilis. For goodness’s sake, stop to think about it for a second.