It’s the only decentralized communication protocol for personal messages that is widely adopted. And yes, it’s a privacy nightmare.

If someone plans to move to my neighborhood and that one has a record of burning down houses, it’s not a good idea to give it a chance.

It’s not about the users, but Facebook as a company that has its own agenda against its users in order to make as much money as possible.

It’s also about Facebook seeing other networks not as friendly co-spaces, but as competitors that it tries to crush.

If you talk about users though, the “worse servers than Facebook” are by far less powerful than Facebook, and they impose no danger to the Fediverse.

Let’s start with Facebook first, the platform that made a walled garden out of

• messengers (went from XMPP to walled garden)
• websites (businesses having facebook pages rather than freely accessible websites)
• used product markets
• online communities
• email (sending email to a Facebook user is converted into a private message on Facebook rather than sending out the email, at least that was a thing in the past)
• … (insert any Facebook service here)

You can’t trust Facebook, it’s about turning its users into a product for marketers, and that’s it.

“healthy” here means “healthy for the Fediverse”, which means “being nice to each other” and supporting diversity, both values being contrary to the Facebook network, which is predatory to other networks, as having proven in the past.

The need is to prevent the predatory network from accessing the weaker one that promotes diversity and freedom of choice.

There is a downside: Because many people don’t see the negative long-term effects, Facebook will have enough time to influence and dominate the Fediverse in a negative way. The masses don’t see what Facebook is doing in the long run.

There’s also not much reason to federate with Facebook. Sign up there if you like that network.

Because the long-term influence of such a powerful yet detrimental network like Facebook is bad, and when the negative effects for the Fediverse show up, or even later, when enough people realize it, the Fediverse will have been influenced in a way that it can’t go back to a healthy state.