Everyone's discussing the short term impact of Facebook crashing the #fediverse party, but I think it will play out pretty simply:
1) Some servers will fully block #barcelona from the get-go. They won't see anything new at first. But their content will still be federated and likely make it into the hands of FB regardless.
2) Of the servers that don't go for the full #fediblock , they'll have their hands full with moderation. Some may quickly limit (silence) barcelona in order to maintain a good user experience.
3) Some mastodon users will migrate servers to get the experience they want. Every server will either be "Open!" or "FB-FREE!", probably listed right on the About page.
4) Facebook will claim they ARE the fediverse and talk about how amazing and easy their version is. They'll try to sell that story so they can stop bleeding users. They'll flood the fediverse with instagram "influencers", gaining a sizeable audience at little cost.
They'll ignore our entire discussion. "Come try out the better fediverse!"
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But what about the long term? Where will FB go with this? Does the whole block/don't block discussion even matter in the long term? What value does the fediverse have to FB outside the short term influx of users?
1) Will they quickly build proprietary features and try the whole Apple "green bubble" thing to sell the story that their version is better? If sending money, collecting add revenue, and other features are FB-only, will EEE work?
2) Will Mastodon growth be totally stymied? Will development continue at its current pace, or will people see it as a lost cause?
3) Will FB push their own fediverse software for others to run? I could see them getting corporations and governments to sponsor local FB instances, providing a kickback and data to FB. This could give them a foothold into China and other places where governments get to control the instance. It would also allow them to cater to the alt-right and other unsavory groups. They could claim zero responsibility for moderation, while effectively being in support of and advertising to these groups.
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Everyone is busy discussing the fediblock, but even IF you get servers representing the majority of users to cooperate--does FB even care? All it does is reduce their short term influx of users. The rest of the story remains unchanged. Seems like the discussion should be around long term impact and how to get ahead of it.
Regarding solutions in the short term, we should be focused on moderation tools. For example, what new tools might be needed to handle enormous instances like Barcelona? If it were hosted by anyone but Facebook we'd probably be having that debate!
Something in between "limit" and "restrict" might be valuable at the server level. Maybe an allow-list that automatically restricts both posts and replies from all accounts not followed by local users?
Personally, I think all too often folks focus on moderation without considering ways of empowering users to create the experiences they want without relying on the work of instance owners, especially considering the complexity of an owner trying to implement moderation that matches different actual wants of users.
Surely there are ways to hand this power to users, to craft their own experiences, especially when it's something like Barcelona.
