although this is unlikely to substantially and directly impact us and is a more immediate concern for Mastodon and similar fediverse software, we've signed the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact as a matter of principle. that pact pledges the following:
i am an instance admin/mod on the fediverse. by signing this pact, i hereby agree to block any instances owned by meta should they pop up on the fediverse. project92 is a real and serious threat to the health and longevity of fedi and must be fought back against at every possible opportunity
the maintainer of the site is currently a little busy and seems to manually add signatures so we may not appear on there for several days but here's a quick receipt that we did indeed sign it.
How do we even know that they're not already running instances? Why would they start announcing it, especially after the response?
This has to do with Project92, not just with Facebook hosting Mastodon instances. I wouldn't put it past them to discretely host instances to gather data, but we can't see them, and therefore we can't defend against them (and mass-defederation of potential instances is a recipe for disaster).