Will they though? From what I can tell, Mastodon/lemmy users would get ad free access to threads content without turning over any personal data. If I’m not off base on that, that seems like a thing that meta is going to avoid.
I don’t want trash from meta crowding up the place and would probably leave a server that federated with threads but I am pretty sure that’s never going to happen.
Honestly I think it's far more mundane than that. I suspect it's engineers at meta re-using an existing open codebase to kickstart a new product, then leadership further up the chain liking it for efficiency plus hedging on future compliance challenges
It could even be that ActivityPub solves infrastructure issues that have been quietly internally plaguing Meta and that's why they're excitedly embracing ActivityPub for Threads