@onepict

> On any online space, you should consider who you give power to. Who has the control over who you choose to associate with?

I concur 100% with this assertion.

> All that the instances who sign the fedipact are doing is signalling to some of us that somewhere is safe for folk who don't want to engage with Facebook at all.

I don't think that's all, and actually, What those instances may (inadvertently) be signalling is that they will take it upon themselves to remove the Freedom of Association from the user themselves, without prior expectation or consultation.

I don't know where "Freedom of Speech" entered the conversation, but the notion of "Freedom of Association" has indeed been taken from those who have chosen to excercise those privileges belonging to the users themselves. Waking up and realizing that you can no longer communicate and share recipes with grandma, without evern having been consulted, is an affront to the Freedom of Association - it's inclusive of an even larger issue surrounding the reasons that *smolweb and single-user and self-hosted platforms are protective of such principles Freedom of Association.

Further, it serves to create an environment (especially when so many platforms now support migration ingress) where one's Fediverse accounts are considered ever more transient, as the realization that having an account on a silo based Fediverse instance is the antipathy of #Fediverse and #DeSoc philosophies.

It also erodes the trust between the average user and administrators that you thought you could entrust with respecting your freedom of association with.

> This is a Freedom of Association issue, ...

it is indeed, and a betrayal of trust for anyone who realizes that it is the overreach by someone else to decide that you should not have the Freedom of Association that likely brought most folks to the Fediverse in the first place.

I did a little non-scientific, anecdotal survey by contacting people I know on many of the instances that arbitrarily decided to remove those freedoms from their users overnight, and discovered that many have already migrated to other instances, or are contemplating it - the interesting thing? Many of my acquaintances had already decided to, or even configured their accounts to block #Threads; but to have someone else tell them what they're allowed, or not allowed to do, is a violation of someone's freedom to choose for themselves by despot personalities who dismiss the relevance of a right to choose for oneself.

It's a simple matter, to block instances, at the domain level, from one's own user account, and on most Fediverse platforms, there's actually an announcement utility (usually only used to beg for donations) whereby administrative staff can inform their user base of their own ability to control how they themselves choose to exercise their own preferences with respect to #Freedom_of_Association.

Ironically, when perusing the stats, it's the very largest (deprecated, monolithic silo oriented) Fediverse instances (in terms of the # of user accounts and MAU) that have chosen NOT to trample upon the individual user's Freedom to Associate with whom they themselves decide.

NOTE to Fediverse instance admins: Please take under consideration the trust that has been placed in you with respect to the freedoms all individuals are entitled to determine for themselves - reach out to your user base, deploy surveys, collect votes, whatever, but please don't just decide for someone else what you decide is good for people who are NOT YOU.

Subjugation and assimilation into the Borg Collective goes both ways folks.

#AYBABTU (All Your Base Are Belong To Us)

#tallship #despotism #dystopian #authoritarianism

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