The problem here isn’t talking to Meta or Meta making a federated platform.

I feel like many people here have exactly a problem with that, but that’s nice to hear!

The problem is the need to push against the insistence of Meta to keep these meetings off the record. It’s against the entire philosophy of something like not only fediverse but FOSS in general.

That is a good point, that I didn’t pay enough attention to, you’re right.
But I still maintain that it wasn’t a good response, because the desire for an on the record meeting wasn’t expressed.

We will accept you as long as you’re bringing value to us, not the other way round, got that Meta?

That’s certainly true, but I didn’t get that message, because Meta certainly will bring value to the fediverse, billions of monkeys on billions of phones tend to produce Dime Novels from time to time, and those are worth dimes after all.
Billions of monkeys are difficult to wrangle though, and the admins of mastodon.world should be interested in learning how to handle it, when suddenly those monkeys all start commenting on a mastodon.world thread from Threads (or whatever they’ll call it)