Risks/rewards for whom?

For programming.dev? If all we care about is the survival of this website, then yeah maybe Meta poses a risk and we should defederate.

But (with respect to the admins), no one cares about programming.dev. We care about the vision of a “fediverse”, where all instances’ users can talk to one another if they choose. If that’s what we care about, there’s no choice here: federate, or you’ve already broken the vision.

Look, no one is saying that programming.dev should promote Meta’s content on their home page. Let’s beef up our moderation/content filtering tools:

• Let users block all @meta.com and all @meta.com communities if they choose.
• Let community mods block posts/cross-posts from @meta.com communities or users.
• Let community mods decide never to let @meta.com users subscribe or see posts on their communities.
• Let the instance owners decide never to feature a @meta.com user’s post or a @meta.com community post on “all” or “local”. Make it so that the only way to find a Meta post/user is by actively searching for it or subscribing to their communities. That’s all well and good.

But defederation is worse than that. What defederation really means is: “Even if programming.dev users want to see Meta content or post there, we won’t allow it. Go create an account there instead.”. As soon as you do that, it’s not a fediverse anymore.