although this is unlikely to substantially and directly impact us and is a more immediate concern for Mastodon and similar fediverse software, we’ve signed the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact as a matter of principle. that pact pledges the following:
i am an instance admin/mod on the fediverse. by signing this pact, i hereby agree to block any instances owned by meta should they pop up on the fediverse. project92 is a real and serious threat to the health and longevity of fedi and must be fought back against at every possible opportunity
the maintainer of the site is currently a little busy and seems to manually add signatures so we may not appear on there for several days but here’s a quick receipt that we did indeed sign it.
The thing is that this isn’t really a marriage of equals; if Meta joins the Fediverse then Meta will swallow the Fediverse, simply by dint of having several orders of magnitude more users.
It would be akin to India applying to become the 51st US state; if we let them in, they’d end up controlling 80% of the House and the Electoral College and the US wouldn’t really be the US anymore.
While I appreciate the analogy, the electoral college is a seriously broken system which hasn’t protected proportional representation in a long, long time.
Oh certainly; my point was simply that in a system where population = influence, letting in a new group with several times as many people as all of your existing groups put together means that that new group effectively takes over.
The electoral college was never intended to protect proportional representation. The whole idea of equal representation in the Senate was to avoid high population states running roughshod over the smaller ones. This obviously dilutes the influence of higher population states and amplifies the smaller ones at the electoral college.
The system is not broken though. It does exactly what it was originally intended to do 240 years ago. You just don’t agree with it’s intention and results
Each state gets a number of electors equal to its congressional representation (senators plus representatives). If the number of representatives weren’t capped it would go a long way towards making the Electoral College more representative of the population.