Given TikTok’s precarious situation, it’s no surprise they’re going out of their way to bend to the whims of US politics. Face it, there are a lot of Republicans ready to justify banning TikTok by pointing to teenagers getting abortion advice from the platform.
Sure, just like you can run an SMTP server that blocks incoming connections from Gmail. It’s not illegal, obviously, but it goes against the spirit of an open, interoperable internet.
To me, the argument for accepting Meta into the Fediverse goes beyond gain and loss. If you run an Internet service, you have a moral obligation to make a good faith attempt to interoperate with anyone using the protocol as intended.
By a similar token, if you run a mail server, you should accept SMTP connections as far as possible. Yes, you can ban spam, but you should not ban connections from Gmail even if Gmail is a privacy-destroying bad idea. By all means, allow individual users to set up their own block lists, but this should not be done at the server level.
Let’s all be grateful that Google handled GChat and its successors so incompetently. There was a window of time in which the world might have gotten hooked into using Google for instant messaging, which would have been a privacy disaster. Lucky, they fucked it up.