A good response. Civlised and to-the-point.

I disagree.

I hope there’ll be people discussing sensibly.
For example the question how the rest of the fediverse would like Meta to act, when / if they have the by far largest instance on Fediverse with Threads.
Should they Rate-Limit queries from their users to other Instances, as to not overload them? This would protect other instances, but make the federated experience worse, driving more people to threads.
Would the Fediverse rather that Meta mirrors images etc on their servers too, or pull those from the original server?
Maybe they have UX ideas that would be useful to have somewhat uniform (like the subreddit/community/magazine stuff here), and would like input on them.

Of course just blocking them is an option for the fediverse, but doing that blindly seems like a missed opportunity for both sides.
More freely available content would be great, wouldn’t it?

Maybe they have Ideas on the protocol, that they want to talk with admins about as a first step to gain more perspective. And certainly they are likely to be data-hungry greedy shit, but there is a chance that they are actually good ideas - there are actual people working at meta after all.

There’s tons of ways in which this could be useful, and I don’t really understand the completely blocking approach I see a lot of.
They want to use ActivityPub, that’s awesome, finally something new and big that uses an open freaking standard on the web. What are the downsides? If it sucks for communities they can easily block Meta.
Yes, Meta is not a Company working for the betterment of the world, certainly.
But maybe, just maybe, goals align here, and Meta can make money and improve the Fediverse and the Internet with it. And certainly, maybe they want to “take over” ActivityPub, and that would indeed be bad.
So, if they want to change the Protocol, be very, very wary of their proposals. But even there there they could just want reasonable improvements because they suddenly deal with 100x of the next biggest instances.

tl;dr: when you tell people what you’d like them to do, it increases the chances of them doing that.

An interesting and nuanced response - thank you. I'm not quite sure I agree, as it rather assumed good faith - but food for thought.

There seems very little incentive for Meta to federate with anyone, except good faith, right?
They’ll double the Fediverse Userbase in an hour, or less.

The 'embrace, extend, extinguish' strategy is a well known one. Set out with a strategy to become the biggest instance, capture lots and lots of new users. Introduce some swanky new features that 'unfortunately initially don't federate very well, but we are working in that'. Then defederate from other instances that don't adopt your features - etc etc

But they won't be capturing new users from the Fediverse, they will capture them from Facebook and Instagram, and since this is mainly a Twitter competitor, also from Twitter.

I think you're missing the point. We are weary of Facebook's decision to enter the Fediverse exactly because we know it sees the Fediverse as a long-term threat and it could try to extinguish it. While they at first would adopt open standards and protocols, what stops them from creating proprietary extensions and using those and its dominance and resources to make it difficult for users to switch to other platforms in the Fediverse?

While they at first would adopt open standards and protocols, what stops them from creating proprietary extensions and using those and its dominance and resources to make it difficult for users to switch to other platforms in the Fediverse?

Nothing, which should probably raise concerns around how good a standard ActivityPub actually is if all it takes to drive a truck through its intent is one bad actor.

Is it really fair to call Facebook just one bad actor? It's one of the largest corporations in the world, has some of the largest social media and messaging platforms out there. In terms of resources, there are very few companies, let alone individuals or groups, that can compete with Facebook.

If you look at it in these terms, you understand that Facebook has an interest in making sure that ActivityPub doesn't too large without Facebook having a say in it. If it could control the whole internet, I'm sure it would. So, no, I don't agree with your framing of the issue.