I don’t think it’s accurate and actually a bit disingenuous to lump WordPress and Flipboard together with Facebook/Threads, because these entities behave drastically differently, Flipboard and Wordpress are sharing their content with others on the Fediverse (plus wordpress is hosted software, people can run their own versions of it independently) without trying to compromise and manipulate users, Facebook is trying to recruit Fediverse users onto their platforms, that’s why they’re doing one-way Federation and banning Keywords related to Fediverse related platforms. To say “iT’S All cOrPOrATe” is ignoring these key facts, which is why I say it seems disingenuous.

Bad instances are going to be a struggle always, that’s just the nature of a federated network, there will always be bad actors, compromised nodes, and malicious users that we have to deal with, that’s never going to end no matter what happens. Even if it becomes infrequent it’ll still always happen.

Anything that doesn’t devolve into “us vs. them”, doesn’t matter who “us” and “them” is.

The fediverse was designed to let every instance or even every user decide for themselves who they want to interact with. There is no need to persuade others to use the fediverse the same way you do. A few months ago I wrote a blog post about why my personal single-user instance wouldn’t defederate from corporate-run instances as long as they play by the rules, with the clear intent to defederate if they do things that harm the way I interact with the fediverse. People got outright vile, called me names and tried to convince me that any tiny interaction with anyone they don’t like would inevitably lead to the death of the free fediverse.

Personally I would rather have federated social media based on an open protocol where every user can decide what’s the best way to interact with content than being forced into proprietary platforms just to get updates from my favorite video game studio, streamer or artist. It may well be that there are people on the fediverse who exclusively want to interact with vegan FOSS communist hippies and that’s fine. But I’m not one of those people and I don’t see why they should decide how I run my instance or get mad at me about something that doesn’t affect them at all.

Let’s all be as tolerant as we claim we are and treat people (and instances) based on their deeds and not based on how similar they are to ourselves.