then you lose half the users and perhaps half the communities

As a thought, do you really lose them?

For example the “Television” community previously existed on the lemm.ee instance. The lemm.ee instance is scheduled for shutdown. The “Television” community is now hosted on the piefed.social instance.

It has the same users and has the same topics of discussion. Were the users really lost? Did the community really go away?

Let’s pretend Reddit decided it would no longer allow discussion on “Television”. What if BlueSky no longer allowed discussion on “Television”. You’d have to leave those platforms completely. You really would lose those communities. Those users (at least in part) really would be gone.

Is Lemmy.World a big instance? Sure. Would the users and communities really be lost if it went away? I don’t think so.

I’m not surprised, but I agree with the hot take, so maybe it’s only warm.

I think they keep interest in ActivityPub in order to keep regulators concerned with Antitrust at bay. The Fediverse isn’t a real threat in Meta’s view and keeping an engineer or two on it in order to stay invested is worth the cost.

Threads can say they are making an honest effort to work with the larger open source community and open federated internet. As an added bonus, it isn’t actually a lie. Now the effort they’re putting in is the absolute minimum, but it’s there.

Now I still do think this is a positive. While most people on Threads will probably never leave, it does introduce them to the wider Fediverse. It makes the Fediverse a less scary thing.