My guess, is that they know they can't "own" the Fediverse, and their play is more about how to hedge its success and ensure they own a significant revenue stre

My guess, is that they know they can't "own" the Fediverse, and their play is more about how to hedge its success and ensure they own a significant revenue stream from it. So my expectation is that they are making an advertising platform play. All the nodes cost a lot to run, and as the Fediverse grows will only get more resource intensive, and more expensive. If Facebook/Meta can build an advertising product that can fund nodes I'm sure there is a significant number that will take that up. Obviously there will be nodes that push back, I can see nodes de-federating Meta ad supported nodes. Maybe they will surprise us though and actually try and launch a Twitter like product as part of the Fediverse. One of the biggest issues they are going to find though is that so many of the influential Fediverse people are so anti Meta, and anti many of the things that they would want to build. Search and caching/reposting of content seems to be a toxic topic on the Fediverse, but something I'm sure Meta would want. It's going to be exciting watch, will have to get some popcorn.