From a general standpoint, I don’t think that any Mastodon community stands much to lose for taking a neutral stance on Project 92. Meta isn’t a threat to us because of how the fediverse works. It’s not even guaranteed that their app will be 100% intercompatible with Mastodon. It might end up being another kind of halfway there integration that affords them and for that matter, us no benefit. The whole thing might not be something worth caring about, but it might not be great to take an actively positive stance on it, because of the amount of the fediverse moving against it.

From a community standpoint, it’s possible we stand to lose more if the fediverse splinters into anti-Meta spaces, and Meta-neutral or pro-Meta spaces. What Meta coming to fedi has done is show that there is so much potential to divide up all these separated spaces into people disagreeing on points that might be irrelevant to the functionality of the platform. I personally see this nature of Meta as more dangerous than any threat they pose to the protocol. Divide and conquer. How many people are going to be upset when they end up on the “wrong” instance, for whatever their personal opinion is, and how is that going to effect smaller instances that people will learn not to trust, compared to large ones, run by corporations or large organizations. They are not taking over the fediverse, but attempting to divide it and corporatize it, along with any other large organization that wants to take advantage of it.

Either way, I don’t believe that joining any pact is the way to go. Signing onto such a thing is a community commitment whose terms may change over time, to the dissatisfaction of at least one party involved. I believe any decision should be made by this individual instance without the active association with any other. Moving as a group is what Meta and every other corporation expects us to do, leaving us in a compromised state, and though for the past decade or so, it’s how all online communities work, distributed networks allow us to question that status quo. I say no to the pact, but neutral on general defederating or silencing.