it was a “military organization”, he said, that will be used for “aiding law enforcement with riots and illegal immigration”.
The whole time I was reading this, I was wondering how the fuck any of this is legal, and this passage answers my question perfectly: it's not. The constitution explicitly says that the military is never to be used for policing purposes, because the founding fathers were terrified of this exact kind of overreach happening as a result. This is the same as if the Third Amendment somehow became relevant again in modern times. That's why they branded the militia as "disaster relief," for the same reason as Fox News is branded as "entertainment" and not news media; they know this would never hold up against the law.
I would agree if they didn't already shovel in 10 million people from instagram in the past few hours, and you cant leave without deleting your facebook and instagram accounts and everything you have invested in them. They gained in the past few hours more people than the entire Fediverse has gained over the course of several years.
Can we actually fight back, though? most of the people using the Fedi are on Mastodon, primarily coming from places like Twitter and Reddit because of the recent drama. The biggest complaint new people have is about how complicated Masto and other fediverse services are to get into for people who aren't tech savvy, between choosing different instances and figuring out how to use them. Meanwhile, Meta provides a familiar, convenient experience from a brand they already know, even with its horrible reputation. Then when 90% of "fediverse" users are on Threads instead of the rest of the fedi, they'll announce that they are dropping support for ActivityPub and there will only be a few thousand people left elsewhere to mourn it.
Whelp, time to pack up I guess. Mastodon is the biggest player in the fediverse right now, so if Meta EEE's us then the fediverse as a concept is doomed.