And that’s within your right too. It goes both ways.

There’s peer pressure going on right now encouraging Mastodon instance owners not to federate with Meta’s Threads. How is that not gatekeeping?

But that choice should be up to instance owners and people shouldn’t pressure them either way. It’s their instance, after all, not yours.

I’m going to go against the grain here and say that there’s a lot of gatekeeping and shaming going on, especially against the Mastodon owners who are thinking about federating with Meta’s instance.

Federating with Meta’s servers should be a choice. If people want the ability to interact with celebrities and normies, that would be a huge boost to ActivityPub and Mastodon in general, especially for the servers that do end up federating with Meta. Their users would be able to interact and follow all of the mainstream people who are not on Mastodon.

It should be always be a choice. And for those servers that don’t federate, things will remain the same. Don’t try to gatekeep or spread FUD, it just makes you look paranoid and insular.

Centralization reduces friction. Normies who sign up on Mastodon are going to want to be able to talk to all of the other Twitter refugees too. By making mastodon.social the default, it encourages centralization of the mainstream portion of Mastodon’s userbase, such as journalists, official company accounts, public figures, etc.

But most of them are probably going to use BlueSky. I heard journalists have been mostly gravitating towards that option.

It’s because normies want that “centralized” experience. They don’t want to figure out which servers are federated with which server - but they always know that they will have the least issues with the server that has the most active users.

Yeah but then you run into the risk of federation/defederation politics. We’ve already have had a major instance defederate.

I disagree. The large Mastodon instances have managed to survive for a while on donations. I haven’t seen a large Mastodon instance go kaput (though you can correct me if I’m wrong).

I would add that the risk of joining a small server is that the owner can suddenly delete them at any time and you would have to start all over again elsewhere. Best thing to do is to make an account on the large instances only.