I don’t understand what Meta will gain from participating in the fediverse? Their ultimate goal is to make money of Threads and I just don’t see how encouraging an open federation will help them do it? Even 3Eing the fediverse will not do them much good as they already have sooo much traffic already that killing the fediverse will not make a serious change in their figures. But OTOH it does seem like Threads is net positive for the fediverse ATM. Even if all current denizens of the fediverse will block Threads, there is a large group of people that are exposed to the concept of “fediverse” for the fist time and some of them will want to learn more. This is a good thing. Anyway, I don’t know why they are doing it, but I’m cautiously glad they did it. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
While I agree overall, I definitely agree with that last sentence. As someone who originally joined the Fediverse for the first in March via Mastodon, I’ve since then spread out and tried the many other fedi products (is that even the right word to use?) and have since settled on a Misskey forked server called Foundkey for my “Twitter” experience. While I agree with others that Threads being part of the Fediverse is good, I also agree in that the familiarity with Meta/Facebook will make people not want to branch out and explore what else the Fediverse has to offer which in turn hurts everyone else.