I don’t understand what Meta will gain from participating in the fediverse? Their ultimate goal is to make money of Threads and I just don’t see how encouraging an open federation will help them do it? Even 3Eing the fediverse will not do them much good as they already have sooo much traffic already that killing the fediverse will not make a serious change in their figures. But OTOH it does seem like Threads is net positive for the fediverse ATM. Even if all current denizens of the fediverse will block Threads, there is a large group of people that are exposed to the concept of “fediverse” for the fist time and some of them will want to learn more. This is a good thing. Anyway, I don’t know why they are doing it, but I’m cautiously glad they did it. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
They can (will) do that without federating. Federating (or not) is not going to make any appreciable difference.
This is why I place it as third and optional goal. Few percent of people who knows fediverse doesn’t participate in it because not many instance is as reliable as big companies service. They may be willing to migrate to mastodon when the software is more matured, but now migrating to threads instead because of meta’s backing.