Yep. I very much agree with all of you. Here’s how I phrased it in Embrace, Extend, and Exploit: Meta’s plan for ActivityPub, Mastodon and the fediverse

Of course, if and when Meta sees the fediverse as a significant threat, they’ll ruthlessly stamp it out.

But right now, they’ve got a huge potential longer-term opportunity to coopt the fediverse as a basis for decentralized surveillance capitalism. It might not work out, of course, but even if it doesn’t keeping a neutered fediverse around might still be useful to Meta as long as it’s not a threat to their dominance (just as Google subsidizes the Firefox browser).

Agreed, and a very good point. “Visible to people on allow-list servers” is very much along the lines of local-only posts (“visible to people only on this server”). I think of it as “scoped” visibility, although leashed or moored might well be a better term.

Exactly. There’s a core disagreement about whether making a public post means consenting to it being used for all purposes without consent (the multiple battles about consent-based search), but relatively few people are confused about whether bad actors will use it without consent.

A very interesting idea! Actually it seems to me there are two interesting ideas here:

• endorsements. Something like this (whether it’s from feeler servers or other sources) is clearly needed to make consent-based federation scale. IndieWeb’s Vouch protocol and the “letters of introduction” Erin Shephard discusses in “A better moderation system is possible for the social web” are similar approaches. You could also imagine building endorsement logic on top of an instance catalog like the FediSeer (of The Bad Space) or infrastructure like FIRES.

• restricting visibility of a boost to servers the original post is federated with. This is something that’s long overdue in the fediverse! Akkoma’s bubble is a somewhat-similar concept; Bonfire’s boundaries might well support this.