I can see the merit in arguments both for and against federation with meta.

• Pro: I like the idea of people discovering the Fediverse more easily through a mainstream outlet, and there has to be some benefit to be gained from the potential increase in the user base. I would like to be inclusive and see a diverse array of opinions, and “block 30 million people because they’re on a platform we don’t trust” doesn’t sit right with me.
• Con: I, too, have a very strong distrust for wealthy corporations and am sure that they are planning to eliminate us as “competition.” The thing that concerns me more, however, is the major instances that are trying to organize to not only defederate meta, but defederate any instance that refuses to do the same. This terrifies me; losing access to the meta community is one thing I’m on the fence about, but losing access to the instances that are already a part of our network would be devastating. In a way, it feels like Meta is already succeeding in destroying the fediverse without even connecting to it yet.

With how torn I am on the whole thing, I was thinking about a “wait and see” approach, but the con above kind of adds a sense of urgency. The deciding factor I landed on feels a bit silly, but I’m going to stand by it: I think that we should defederate from any “instance” that isn’t using open-source software. The ability for a user to know what’s in the software they’re using is the least-awful metric I can come up with to determine whether I feel like it should be a part of this world we’re building.