So Meta’s plan is to make a twitter-alike that spies on its users and manipulates them into being the hate fueled engagement engine, and then inflict that on the fediverse?
No one outside their boardroom knows what Meta's plan is, but I doubt they care much about fedi. They are trying to kill off Twitter and take that marketshare of ~500M users. The fediverse with a total of 9M users (and no advertising revenue) isn't very important in that scheme.
They are in deep legal trouble with EU privacy regulations and need to show to EU they are "taking things seriously". ActivityPub was most likely a nice "freebie" they can use and point out they offer interoperability. The whole fediverse bit is just to escape further GDPR trouble with EU.
What’s to stop everyone from pointing out as often as possible that users can still talk to Zuck’s twits without the spying and manipulation by simply doing so from a non-Meta instance, and then defederating Meta once they are no longer dominant?
I'm not sure I understand what you mean? That people would migrate away from Threads if they knew they only knew can access their followers from somewhere else? Why on earth would that ever happen? The opposite is more likely.
shinoby