Yep. I very much agree with all of you. Here’s how I phrased it in Embrace, Extend, and Exploit: Meta’s plan for ActivityPub, Mastodon and the fediverse

Of course, if and when Meta sees the fediverse as a significant threat, they’ll ruthlessly stamp it out.

But right now, they’ve got a huge potential longer-term opportunity to coopt the fediverse as a basis for decentralized surveillance capitalism. It might not work out, of course, but even if it doesn’t keeping a neutered fediverse around might still be useful to Meta as long as it’s not a threat to their dominance (just as Google subsidizes the Firefox browser).

Exactly. There’s a core disagreement about whether making a public post means consenting to it being used for all purposes without consent (the multiple battles about consent-based search), but relatively few people are confused about whether bad actors will use it without consent.