Read their privacy policy. They already admitted they will scrape info from 3rd party users/communities which interact with their users.

This is not a good thing.

I get why people don’t want anything from Meta around stuff they use. They’re obviously awful. I just don’t think that even 5% of Fediverse users are going to ditch for Threads if Meta defederates. They were here before Meta and I can promise you not a single person on earth is signing up for Mastodon because it will federate with Threads only to have the rug pulled out from under them. This is a small niche community and that will not change with or without Meta. The people that Meta could siphon with EEE are already in their ecosystem.

I don't really see an argument for "extinguish" on that article. It looks like just "embrace, expand, unembrace." I can think of a few reasons how meta could degrade the quality of the metaverse, but the example of xmpp doesn't quite smell right - activitupub is mature (even if I disagree with lot of the core specs), and the fediverse is much more about "eventual consistency" instead of real-time chats where both side have to be online at the same time.

I don't really see an argument where Google drew people away from xmpp - the author themself said that nobody cared about the few xmpp users, so it's not like Google was drawing long-time xmpp users away.

I'd love to hear other opinions on that article.