I do agree with Ada in broad strokes. The Fedipact is just a petition. Meta doesn’t care if you sign it. And it’s not binding either—you can sign it and end up changing your mind and federating anyway, or you can defederate without signing it (like Blahaj).

It’s still interesting data though. It may not represent every instance’s stance on Meta, but it does reflect the stances of those that sign, and suggest that they’re more active in the discourse.

You’re right on the money with it being about admins and not users, too. Users aren’t even allowed to sign it, only mods and admins can.

It’s hard to extrapolate too much just from this data, I think.

That said, my read on it: Mastodon is way bigger than any other fedi platform, and with popularity comes outsiders to fedi culture and politics and people who just don’t care. Also, a lot of the big instances want to federate because they have more of a growth mindset, so they when they see Meta they just see more potential users.

It’s interesting though that Mastodon is the platform that would be most affected by federation. We here on Lemmy don’t have great interoperability with the microblog side of the fediverse, so we’re less likely to see Threads activity.