Great answers in general, but I just want to pitch in my answer, because this was how I was able to make it click, and maybe it’ll help someone else

Let’s imagine if a company wants to destroy a small group. In this case, Meta likely wants to destroy the Fediverse because it recognizes that the Fediverse could compete with Meta in the future. What can that company do? If you were that company, this is what you can do:

1. First, pretend to be nice and say that you want to work together with that group. You want a cooperation, and as a big company, you have the resources to make the group even better. The small group is ecstatic and accepts the cooperation.

2. At first, you do exactly what you said you would do. You put in 50% (or sometimes even more) of the effort, and the developers of the small group put in 50% of the effort. The cooperation seems pretty good and lots of work is getting done.

3. Over time, you slowly start putting in less and less work into cooperating. Maybe for one feature, you put in 40% of the work, then for the next, you put 30%, etc. Eventually, you’re developing your own features without sharing your work with the devs of the small group, and the devs have to struggle to try to figure out what you did. Meanwhile, the devs still think you’re acting in good faith, so they’re still sharing their side of the work.

4. Users look at your platform and the small group’s platform, and they think that the devs of the small group are just not really that competent. They don’t realize that the reason why the small group seems to be lagging behind is because you’re refusing to share your side of the work. Users start switching over to using your platform, since it’s so the same content anyways, right? It’s just less buggy and has more competent development, right?

5. Once most of the users have switched over, you then suddenly flip your stance and say that, really, cooperation isn’t really working and that you want to stop cooperating. You break off from the small group, and since most of the users have already switched over to your platform, they leave your small group, not realizing that they’ve been duped. The sudden decrease in users in the small group completely devastates the group and the group never fully recovers.

The group could still exist after the break, but its reputation has been destroyed and people no longer see it as a viable alternative to big companies. As a result, even if the group remains standing, the user base will not grow any longer, and the group may even end up with fewer users than they started with.

How do we know for sure that what I said will happen? Because other tech companies have done this exact same thing before. In fact, it’s so common that it’s got its own name: EEE. So a lot of people here are seeing the writing in the wall. If Meta is offering a cooperation with the Fediverse, what do you think is the likelihood that they’re actually wanting to cooperate in good faith?

There is a known strategy called EEE (Embrace, extend, and extinguish).

First, they embrace the open web. Millions of people who never would’ve joined the Fediverse (and, probably, don’t even know what the Fediverse is) flock to Threads and start to interact with us.

Then, they extend the open web, adding features to Threads that aren’t compatible with our servers. People on Threads don’t understand what’s wrong with our server (even though it’s Threads that’s the source of incompatibility).

Finally, they decide they’re “having trouble maintaining compatibility with third party servers” and start to break off from us, leaving us with no way to interact with our new friends. Unless, of course, we make a free Threads account…

Google Talk is perhaps the most relevant example of this. Here’s more details.

I think the primary fear seems to be giving Meta access to our user data. The concerns seem to be not completely founded but even then there is still the uneasy feeling with helping facebook of all companies with their next project