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
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.
It’s not only about ignoring Facebook users. Imagine in real life a bully comes to your group and you could block him, so you don’t see him, but he still influences the people around you in a negative way, changing the environment you used to love. You better make sure he stays out of your circle. Facebook has a long record of destroying other social networks.
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.
I think many go dark without announcement. In the last hours the list of participating subreddits grew from 3500 to 6000. You can search it on https://reddark.untone.uk/, it’s there now.
This one has a pretty nice look with a list of all 6000 participating subreddits and fading in in real-time when a subreddit goes dark:
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.