Well-regulated capitalism on the other hand has resulted in an explosion of technological advancement like no other era in human history.

The key is regulation. Not too little, but not too much either. Some things, like minimum wage, are clearly under regulated. Other things, like mandating USB-C, are honestly better left to the free market (and I fucking love USB-C.)

Yes, it's amazing.

so instance mods will be incentivized to comply with Facebook’s demands to attract new users and maintain their current one

This is where your argument falls apart. Why? There is no incentive for instance mods to want to grow their instances exponentially.

If Facebook's ActivityPub grows to be incompatible with the existing implementation, who cares? So what if you run a Mastodon instance and aren't getting millions of new users a day?

This is much ado about nothing. While there is a shared platform, enjoy the ride, and if they don't want to play by your rules anymore, there's no harm to anyone in saying goodbye and staying your course.

Unpopular opinion: It's actually kinda nice, I don't mind it.

There are no users “exploring open source alternatives.” Have you seen the Lemmy signup flow? It’s a complete shitshow that probably turns away 95% of people to begin with.

Facebook almost certainly doesn’t see Lemmy and Mastodon as a threat or competitor. They adopted ActivityPub because it’s nice, and they’ll move on as they need to scale, and Lemmy and Mastodon will continue to survive as they always have.

100% agreed with this. The scaremongering just makes no sense.

It is absurd to think XMPP would have gained traction without Google. And it is an objectively shitty protocol, so Google dropping it was the right move. It is kind of weird to see people holding up Google dropping XMPP as some horrifying example of embrace, extend, extinguish, when anyone that's actually developed software with the protocol wants it to die in a burning fire.

• Mulberry silk sheets, pillowcases, duvet covers ($1.2k/set) - best sleep I've ever had, keeps me crisp and cool at night

• Eames chair ($10k) - the best lounge chair I've ever had

• LG OLED TV as a PC monitor - the best PC monitor you can get

There is incentive for competition from Google, Twitter, etc, that would cause federation as a whole to grow without resulting in a single authority taking over the network.

I feel like there's no winning if you're a dev at one of these companies. Go with a centralized protocol, you get shit for creating a walled garden. Take part in federation, and people give you shit for that too. I think it's genuinely amazing that we are seeing engineers that have made some of the most fundamental software that the internet runs on dip their toes into federation.