I had a professor once who’s thing was Russian history from the 16th Century through WWII, and various other connected things. Who said once that the founders of the Paris Commune are rolling in their graves, to see what became of their movement. Side note He was kinda Conservative but he gave me the reading list that turned me against Capitalism, “If you’re going to read left wing sources… I can at least point you at the good ones”

I think this is an overreaction… Meta may think it can do an E^3 on the ActivityPub universe, but the thing is…

1. This community (Wider Fediverse) is built on the principal that The Content Moderation is the value add. I am here because i don’t wanna be trolled by queer hating ableist, keyboard warriors, that or called a heretic because most Catholics on social media have drunk the right wing kool aid.
2. Content Moderation is impossible at Meta’s scale, just not economically viable… 2a This is why AP exists to allow scaling without losing the ability to moderate effectively
3. Even if it was, Meta’s profits depend on allowing As MUCH CONTENT as possible, so it’s in there interest to moderate badly.

They’ll get defederated within a week or less by all but mastodon.social probably. As soon as some transphobic arsehat, throws a fit over mutual aid… They will keep going for a while talking to the people that talk to them but eventually they will rip the fedicode out of their codebase. Just like Gab did…

AND During the time that the fediverse code is active in Meta’s thing it will introduce a fuckton of people to the concept of federation, and some will see the benefits of… a more “Community Driven Internet” so to speak, so that’s a win for us.

There is an aspect to this that I’d like to mention, and that is you should consider the community of people around your distro, when makling this choice. There’s a point at which online guides won’t suffice, or you won’t know what what to Google, and you’ll have to reach out on forums or IRC or something, although i hear kids these days like Discord. I have long sense learned to pick my distros based on the people around them. I was Debian/Ubuntu foir years but switched when they started giving me bad vibes. Fedora has been great, i just wish there contributor documentation and onboarding was a bit better. And on community factors I’d recommend Gentoo over Arch any day and twice on Sundays.

this is a point I think most newcomers to Linux/Fediverse/Indieweb/etc. fail to grasp. To use these technologies, puts you in a far closer relationship to the people making/maintaining the software, then you would otherwise be. To Microsoft/Google/Random Cooperation. You’re just an inconvenient expense. You’re probably not even the primary customer. But to your instance admin, your linux distro people, you can be much more, and you’ll have a better experince if you at least pop by and say hello occasionally :)

Anyway sorry for the length of this response, tl:dr check the forums and chats before you pick a distro see how they treat people, see if you vibe because you’ll depend on those people to keep your stuff running