All of this is true, but none of it contradicts what I said. Meta needs Federation to flaunt the bigwig researchers and developers from other instances. They will eventually build their own stockpile over time, but they wouldn't start with ActivityPub support if their intention was to eventually remove it. If Meta leaves the Fediverse, it goes back to how it is today. That's not a nightmare scenario for most people who are already using Mastodon, and it would put the leverage back into the hands of the users who could coerce Meta users to switch instances for more lax federation.

The ActivityPub ecosystem stands to lose nothing either way. Meta is walking a fine line with the remainder of the community that trusts them, but stands to integrate into a pretty nice system if they pull things off.

Alternative trajectory:

1. Meta conditionally federates with Mastodon instances that sign the deal (allow ads to be pushed, data to be collected, etc)

2. Small/vocal instances reject the deal and defederate.

3. Some large instances do take the deal.

4. Small/vocal instances defederate from the large ones.

5. Large Mastodon instances become pointless as they're isolated from the rest of Mastodon and have no real value over simply using Threads.

6. Large Mastodon instances implode, and the Mastodon fediverse becomes even smaller than it already is.