“I don’t want to federate with meta, but I also don’t want to federate with anyone else who does federate with meta”

It’s so terrifying that there are whole instances that are now attempting to dictate who the rest of the fediverse is allowed to federate with. And frankly I think it’s a downward spiral if that is allowed. Because if they do it once, they will do it again and again.

How is that dictating anything? A given instance has no inherent right to be federated with, it’s the entire point of federation. The folks who bizarrely want meta getting their claws into the fediverse expecting everyone else to go along feels much more dictatorial to me.

In one example the objecting instances do nothing more than refuse to interact with the instances they choose not to interact with.

In the other example, a smaller number of instances want to tell the entire rest of the fediverse that they MUST interact with them.

No.