… for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive …

If we can't convince people of our point of view, then that's our failing. Also, users on an individual level have the ability to block communities from their own feed, and mods have the ability to ban people and moderate views on their community. By de-federating, we're saying "we hereby prevent anyone on our server from interacting with users on Meta, even if they want to". That doesn't seem appropriate.

corporations do not merit civil personhood, yet I think focusing on free speech is veering away from the question and hand: in particular, how should the Fediverse (or at least our instance in particular) respond on engaging with Facebook, in light of what we currently know of the corporation’s historic actions, as well as our uncertainty of it’s future actions.

If we want to be a fediverse, then we IMO by definition allow users to post/join/view any communities they choose no matter where it's hosted. If we don't do that, we're not really a fediverse.

I suppose we could also rephrase this question more generally. I.e how should Fediverse communities respond to the hypothetical approach of other social media conglomerates, supposing the Fediverse gains the attention of not just Facebook, but also:

That would be great! Every company should join the fediverse. That way, they'd all have a strong interest to keep federating with others, because no one wants to cut themselves off from valuable content. In fact, the only thing that does worry me about Meta joining the fediverse is that they might become "too big". The more companies join, the less likely that is to happen.****