[Disclaimer: This post isn't trying to advocate for any decision, I'm trying to make sense of the situation while talking out loud.]

I've always known that the fediverse was going to end up like IRC and split off into closed networks that require vetting to whitelist servers into their federation.

This loss of innocence is an unfortunate milestone that every open federated platform goes through as more people join and public interest grows along with abuse. It was never a question of if but when and what would trigger this eventuality.

Turns out the 'what' is going to be Facebook.

Regardless of where you stand on this the results will be clear: Instances now have to choose between doing nothing and federating with Facebook either directly or accidentally, or taking action and cutting off Facebook by defederating every instance that might even indirectly federate with it.

Since the latter is a management nightmare for admins on a growing system that was intentionality designed to be promiscuous this will eventually turn into a closed off whitelist based no-facebook island.

Any other approach of an open network will eventually federate its posts and social graph with Facebook even if only for a moment, no matter how hard the admins are working to keep them away.

This has been made into an especially hard decision thanks to several admins of large instances deciding to federate with Facebook, making a hard choice even harder - anyone choosing to split away will have to cut a great many people and connections and start over with a smaller network. This is practically a fork.

I wish I had easy solution for this but I don't. No matter which action we take is going to suck just as badly as it was inevitable.