With such a mass of users, all those people now only have one thing in common: they are consumers. That's the only point of the platform, grouping these people and feeding them ads.

The comments are merely a distraction between two ads.

This is why there is a good reason for keeping a little barrier of entry to the fediverse: this barrier is also a barrier to advertisers.

I'm new to the whole fediverse thing, so how would you create a barrier to entry apart from individual instances not federating with instances they see as abusive?

Signing up for threads is a lot easier than it is to sign up for usual lemmy or kbin instances. If they have an Instagram account then it's already automated.

If they want to interact here they'd have to create an account for a place like this instead of being able to use their thread account. Which is probably what is meant by barrier to entry. They can't go and use their meta instance. I'm assuming they can't view content from the equivalent of their all, and would have to view it by going directly to the link. So just stuck in lurker mode.