Volume of users is everything here. Picking up enough share grants you a tremendous gravity as a social service. Once a service has network effect on their side it takes an extraordinary amount to unseat them - and Instagram users will pad the numbers at first but who knows if they will engage. Fedi users are demonstrably early adopters willing to put up with a new service’s teething issues. If meta can plug in and grab them it’s a big win.

I don’t think fedi is currently competing with any meta property? This is an opportunistic land grab from meta aiming to capitalise on twitter’s weakness. Fedi offers them a ready made protocol tested at scale.

Completely agree that this is where the really exciting potential is, but equally a potential for misuse as algo development will be a black box to most.

I think nit picking each others speech is the true cringe redditism

Illegally?? I very much doubt that they have written their TOS such that backing up their own servers is criminal