So, I don’t think the NDA thing is really that bad. Corporations do that, and these admins have already decided that they are going to play nice, at least in the short term, so an NDA is the price of admission for learning more about what’s going to happen.

There are deeper problems IMO.

• The big one is leadership. All of these admins are showing that they are either not good leaders or deep down truly think that they own their instance’s and their users in some way or another such that they don’t need to lead users through this episode but instead simply act as a feudal lord.
  • Leadership here would have started an open discussion between admins and users on what this whole meta thing means, and, if admins had particular points of view, doing to work to try to convince the user base, and then providing safe meta-free instances for those that were not convinced and needed safe harbours. This should all have happened months ago. From what I’ve seen, close none of this happened, which indicates that the admins or “brass” of the fediverse just aren’t good at this.
  • If it isn’t competence but entitlement, it’s a different but no better problem. The incident where mstdn.social defederated from mastodon.art over a tiff looks a lot like an admin that has gotten used to the power they have over many many users. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is somewhat pervasive. And to be clear, it makes sense. If you’re putting time and energy into something you’ll eventually feel like it owes you something, least of all the sense of “ownership”, especially if most of the users aren’t donating. Though understandable, it’s toxic and easily capable of leading to some bad behaviour.
  • IMO, once instances get to a certain size and stay that way for a while, they should develop a governmental structure like a co-op, so that there can be fresh blood, multiple eyes, layers of engagement from the user base etc. This isn’t nearly as common as it should be over on mastodon, and it’s a problem waiting to happen.
• The other problem is that these admins were meeting with meta in the first place. It’s a real sign about how they see the relationship … meta have power and the admins are keen to “play nice” with it. Bottom line is that meta need or want what the fediverse has right now … users … they’re necessary to kickstart their new platform. It would make perfect sense for the fediverse admins to get together and say “hey, you want to federate with us … that could work … here’s what we need to know about how you’re going to operate, and the series of lines that will result in defederation if you cross them more than once … cool?”

All together, both this failure of leadership and obsequiousness, are reason enough for many to get iffy about how much they want these people as their admins.

By contrast, I’ve seen hachyderm (my mastodon instance) and fosstodon make relatively clear statements about how they’re approaching the situation and how they’re quite willing to defederate should dodgy behaviour arise. The admin of calckey.social is starting a notmeta.social instance (that’s literally the domain) that will not federate.

Some of these other admins with their relatively bootlicker postures, however, seem like they want something out of this, and as a user, that’s usually a sign that you’re taken for granted.