To grossly oversimplify the contents of that article, I think federating in bad faith could look like:
Joining the ActivityPub protocol, intending to drown the initial userbase with their own so that the fediverse begins catering to the needs of the majority aka their users.
Introducing subtle bugs that make certain instances function suboptimally, but putting the onus on minor developers to fix it because major portions of the user base comes from them.
Adding features to the ActivityPub protocol that benefit all users, but forces most instances to adopt their practices.
Creating their own version of the protocol "ActivityPub+". It's initially open source and well documented, but increasingly deviates from ActivityPub, until it's functionally closed source fully under their control. It's also mandatory to interact their instances.
Defederating everyone who doesn't fall in step, but that's okay because 99% of content is now on MetaPub anyways. This fractures the Fediverse into confused micro shards (or compliant loyalists).
This is a slight tangent now, but Tik Tok's Enshitification by Corey Doctorow describes another great example of long-timeline corporate "playbooks" or patterns that are... not good but increasingly common. That's where Reddit seems to be going unfortunately, but at least we can see why.
This is why we can't have nice things and the #Fediverse might fall prey to big corporations or fail completely:
One big #Mastodon instance blocking another big mastodon instance because their admins have a dispute.
Anyone who wants to block willy-nilly like that should be in charge of no more than a single-user instance. Think of your userbase and the future of the service you're running, for f's sake.
This is how they pick us apart and why users flock to huge centralized instances: because they can't trust you won't have a 3AM rant and disconnect your users from their friends and contacts because the admin of a remote instance said X or Y about you.
Nah, come one people... This is not how you run a service.
Is kbin.social anti-corporation? Should it be? (kbin.social)
I'm seeing discussions on other instances about how a "federated" corporate instance should be handled, i.e. Meta, or really any major company....