I'm already a day late and I haven't actually read all the comments because they're surprisingly a lot here. But here is my two cents, hopefully I'm not just repeating someone else.

Do you want the fediverse to be as big as possible? Or do you want it to grow in a steady manner in a healthy way with healthy discussion?

Letting on the garbage that is popular social media giants like meta, will completely and utterly overwhelm this community. They have millions of users, we have thousands. Every single one of our posts will be drowned out by them. Say goodbye to high quality discourse, we will just become what Twitter and Facebook turned into, the same way that Reddit is going.

I do not care if we have millions of users, our higher bar of Discovery and usability means that we get people who are self-motivated to learn, learn about technology, learn about our culture, learn about our rules.

Would it be nice if it was easier to discover/join the fediverse? Sure. Would it be nice if we had millions of users? Sure. But I want to grow carefully and sustainably. I would rather have a small or medium-sized community with healthy discourse, than a worldwide gigantic social media community where conspiracy theories reign supreme, and the less techy people don't understand how threads are different from Lemmy, and are constantly cross posting and are confused about what they're looking at.

I can block meta communities myself, but I can't block all the hordes of people that will jump on our threads. This is a scalability problem waiting to happen, this is a social discourse problem waiting to happen.

Lastly the only reason that I could possibly imagine that Zuckerberg wants to federate is to keep the only viable alternative to monopolistic social media conglomerates in check. The more people that can talk to us through his platform, the less people will look into and join us. If they can assert their monopolistic practices on the fediverse, they could use the EEE model to make it irrelevant. He is trying to destroy the federated social networks before they are big enough to be a real threat.