AlataOrangeAt best it’s a ploy to attempt to destabilize and conquer what had already been built. At worst it’s an attempt to outright destroy their competition from the inside.
Hopeful the fediverse has enough built-in resilience that Meta’s intention don’t matter and can be safely ignored
LoafyLemonIt can't be ignored. It's outlined in the thread privacy policy that any form of interaction with one of their posts, be it upvoting, boosting or commenting, will allow them to create a surveillance profile for your account, and let them associate it with other Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp data they might already have and use it to serve you ads and 'personalised content'.
Their policies are contagious, meaning that for example if kbin defederates from threads, but lemmy.world doesn't and they can still see each other, meta can still gather information about you because your posts reach them through lemmy.world.
Fediverse must absolutely block threads and every instance that doesn't defederate from meta.
This is all on the open web. If they find it useful to create surveillance profiles of fediverse users they will do so, whether we defederate or not. That’s the current price of being on the internet.
That's technically a possibility, however it would be very illegal. The punishment for breaking GDPR laws can be very severe.