Huh. I was just saying up here that I don't think anybody genuinely believes the fediverse is a Meta competitor, but... guess I was wrong.

Not a competitor, that's the corps view on things (the fediverse taking a piece of it's cake, us not looking at ads and not playing stupid games on their platforms).

Mastodon does not have the upper hand by any metric. Threads alone has an order of magnitude more active users than the entire fediverse and Meta has multiple platforms with billions of users (and have signaled that they want Threads to reach that size).

It still shows up in metrics and market share (not on every chart/pie, but still). What I meant was that it can be taken as a serious player by some. I don't think it really is, but some people do.

And by having the upper hand, I meant as in being more advanced and in it's adolescent stage, not in it's infancy (which wasn't the case with XMPP... maybe it wasn't in it's infancy, but it barely reached puberty). My point was that people on Mastodon, devs and admins, know exactly what they like and you can't really push them around or try and lour them into some scheme, like flushing down millions into Mastodon development (which will put them in their pocket). We've seen this tactic with other companies (Mozilla as the most prominent example) and we know exactly where it leads. This wasn't the case back then, people generally trusted IT companies, they really thought most of them cared about the users. Sure, make a few bucks here and there, but in general, just take care of the users and business as a second thing. Of course, we learned later on that that was never the plan, at all, but it was too late by then.

You can absolutely argue that ActivityPub is a tech trendsetter and has an edge over BlueSky in that it's already up and running. You can't seriously argue that Mastodon or the fediverse are a threat, a competitor or have an advantage over Threads or Meta. One of the biggest hints that Meta isn't going for "EEE" here is that it's probably not worth the effort.

They do the integration for a reason... what that reason might be, I have no idea... might be malicious, might not be. In any case, even if they truly have the best intents for their users (which I seriously doubt) and the Fediverse (which I also seriously doubt), that doesn't mean that the product of those good willed intentions can't be taken to another level, i.e. used to do bad things. Remember, the dynamite wasn't invented to be used in bombs.