Not quite sure what your point is, just general apathy?

That we have different perspectives. I already see us as the old guys shouting at the clouds (of reddit etc) for being bad. I certainly shout enough at most of Metas and Googles and Apples and Tencents products to fit that bill. I certainly don't have all of the technology that some other people use, because I'm not willing to sell my soul to those companies any more.
I don't feel like an early adopter. Lemmy is 4 years old, ActivityPub is 5 years old, Mastodon is 7 Years old.
I feel much more like a niche idiot who doesn't want to give FAANG the rights to his data, and because of that doesn't live with the times and doesn't have google maps, isn't on instagram for my friends to reach and doesn't know about the latest tiktok trend.

If meta comes you’re not going to get to “go back here”, that’s the whole point of discussion - what them coming means for the current fediverse and what kind of damage it can cause.

No, it's about what happens here when meta comes. We will not stop it.
And yes, Meta can do quite a lot of damage, although I'd guess a "non-meta-fediverse" i.e. a fediverse that completely blocks all meta-content would reasonably quickly look just like this, because it's what we have right now.
Anyway, because of the damage they can do, one should talk to them. Even if you can't sway them one iota, you learn of their plans, and can act accordingly.

You can still do the same on reddit yet you felt the need to come here, so obviously you care at least a bit about outside interference.
No I can't create a small reddit and federate with my friends small reddit, let alone the mother-reddit.
I can't even create a small (modern) reddit, as the code is not open anymore.

Nobody’s saying that, in terms of user bases, the Fediverse is comparable to Facebook or Instagram

Well, maybe I got the wrong impression, but I felt like the userbase of the fediverse was implied as the motivation for Meta federating.
And I wanted to put in a comparison, why I don't think that this is the case.

I don't see a reason why Meta should want Threads to federate, except for "well, whatever, doesn't hurt us to get those fractions of a percent". They'll probably have to use whitelists anyway, due to different legal situations on different instances. So at best they'll federate with some of the bigger instances.

Most of us have been on Facebook or Reddit and have given up on those bigger communities and adopted the Fediverse because it aligns with our values and privacy principles.

I'm sorry to tell you, but your privacy isn't exactly great here.
Every Thread, Comment and Upvote at least can be requested from any fediverse instance.
And do you know what, you don't even have to be a fediverse instance yourself to do that.
But I guess you knew that, so you're here because nobody tracks what you look at, which is great, and because you like Open Source.
That's not going to Change when Meta Federates.

Facebook does not. Its Fediverse platform will not suddenly be the opposite of what the company has been doing for more than a decade.

That's true.
But it will be two things, if I may steal the analogy of someone else in this thread:
first it will be a black hole ripping through the Fediverse.
I'd like that to do as little damage as possible.
I'd love it if mastodon continues to grow after Metas release, and doesn't collapse under server costs, Spam and other detrimental effects.
For that, preparing for the coming storm seems useful.

second it will be a huge amount of possible connections, of people.
I'd love to be able to toot a reply to some meta thread.
I mean, wouldn't it be nice if the fediverse would already know certain rules that meta may require to federate with them? And I mean sensible rules, like no/flagged porn, issues with piracy etc.
One could also talk about how Meta allows/blocks instances. A lot of legal trouble for Meta could probably be avoided if they only show posts from a whitelist of instances, but any user could post to their instance.

For both of these effects I think communication with meta can only help.

a niche group of old people yelling at clouds, not willing to get with the times and join the instance that has all the content, all the users and all the new tech improvements.

I feel like this already describes us pretty darn well.
So I don't see the disadvantage to potentially going back here.

People don’t create private instances or join smaller communities for their email provider, they go to gmail, hotmai or even protonmail for the promise of stability, safety and compatibility with others, not getting listed as spam bots or their mail going straight into trash.

you mean like the 89.5% of active users of kbin being on kbin.social or 50% of active lemmy users being on lemmy.ml, lemmy.world or beehaw.org?
That's just normal, and as long as it's still possible to create smaller communities it's fine.

Yeah, because the ~2 Million monthly active users on the whole fediverse actually matters to the company with 2.95 billion active users on Facebook and 1.2 billion monthly active users on Instagram.
those 2 Million Fediverse users are .06% or .167% compared.

yeah, those rounding errors are totally the reason why Meta is going for ActivityPub

The issue is once you open these floodgates you’re not going to be able to close them, at least not without alienating a vast majority of users on both sides.

I mean, users of Meta producs are already plenty alienated from Lemmy etc, aren't they?

once meta gains the majority of users and content on its instances (and this is really more of a “when”, not “if” situation)

I mean, it's a matter of... minutes? hours?, probably not days even.
That's why I'd like to be able to talk to them.

they can start making changes to AP and overall infrastructure and forcing other instances to either adapt to that, or get left behind one by one, similar to what google does regardless of W3C and other browsers have to adapt even though it goes against the agreed standard.

And I agree that these are very very dangerous. I wouldn't say they could only be bad, but still.
Anyway, not following bad changes by meta would leave people where?
Exactly where they are right now.
In that case, Meta joining the fediverse would have been a failed experiment.

it’s going to be the email situation all over again, we’ll have just a few large trusted providers and the rest will be a seemingly unsafe niche that most people avoid.
I have to say... That seems like a win though.

Billions of people using interoparable software to talk to each other. Email is a brilliant success!
Yes, having "few" larger instances isn't great, but on the other hand most companies run their own email server, and those talk fine with anyone else.
Doesn't seem like a terrible result to me.
Much rather "the Email situation" than the "whatsapp situation" or "signal situation" or "facebook situation" or "reddit situation" or "instagram situation" or "tiktok situation" where you have to join that specific thing to talk to people.

meta can already freely pull that data from any instance
ActivityPub baby!

I agree. The Beautiful thing here would be that people sick of Meta could still go to fosstodon, and they could still talk to their niece on Metas Threads.

I can't help but see that as a win for the people not on metas software.

There seems very little incentive for Meta to federate with anyone, except good faith, right?
They'll double the Fediverse Userbase in an hour, or less.

I disagree.

I hope there'll be people discussing sensibly.
For example the question how the rest of the fediverse would like Meta to act, when / if they have the by far largest instance on Fediverse with Threads.
Should they Rate-Limit queries from their users to other Instances, as to not overload them? This would protect other instances, but make the federated experience worse, driving more people to threads.
Would the Fediverse rather that Meta mirrors images etc on their servers too, or pull those from the original server?
Maybe they have UX ideas that would be useful to have somewhat uniform (like the subreddit/community/magazine stuff here), and would like input on them.

Of course just blocking them is an option for the fediverse, but doing that blindly seems like a missed opportunity for both sides.
More freely available content would be great, wouldn't it?

Maybe they have Ideas on the protocol, that they want to talk with admins about as a first step to gain more perspective. And certainly they are likely to be data-hungry greedy shit, but there is a chance that they are actually good ideas - there are actual people working at meta after all.

There's tons of ways in which this could be useful, and I don't really understand the completely blocking approach I see a lot of.
They want to use ActivityPub, that's awesome, finally something new and big that uses an open freaking standard on the web. What are the downsides? If it sucks for communities they can easily block Meta.
Yes, Meta is not a Company working for the betterment of the world, certainly.
But maybe, just maybe, goals align here, and Meta can make money and improve the Fediverse and the Internet with it. And certainly, maybe they want to "take over" ActivityPub, and that would indeed be bad. And even then, wouldn't knowing because they told you be much better than knowing because they're meta?
So, if they want to change the Protocol, be very, very wary of their proposals. But even there there they could just want reasonable improvements because they suddenly deal with 100x of the next biggest instances.

tl;dr: when you tell people what you'd like them to do, it increases the chances of them doing that.

I mean, depending on how deeply the passengers were informed, I think that this should be legal.

If they actually got the information from the dissenting voices, and understood the risks, then I think it should be legal.
But I'd hazard to guess that they didn't get all the relevant info. The CEO is dead now, not sure how many other people were involved in the whole thing, so not sure who you could sue.

Phew, I wonder if the rich people really understood the dangers.

The CEO/Pilot won't get much compassion from me, I think he was told be enough people that the vehicle wasn't safe for the job.
Not sure how much of that was communicated to the passengers though.
I know they had to sign a waiver, but you have to do that for a lot of things that are much more safe.

I mean, it's a currently approved PR

There's also an active Issue about replacing captchas (which are often an issue privacy-wise) with a mCaptcha, where you computer does "Bitcoin-Like" useless calculations which the server easily can verify that you did.
So it would be much more costly to make a billion spam accounts