You are assuming that A. Google isn’t scraping data for their own AI, B. that these companies will create their own instances (which opens them up to a certain amount of liability and requires them to retain moderation/admin and maintenance staff (which costs money)). C. That the enshittification of corporate owned versions of Lemmy and the fediverse won’t push people to Lemmy sooner or later.

A fourth assumption you made is that the Threads federation push was made in order to do anything other than create hype around a feature that might draw people away from places like the fediverse. I kind of assumed (maybe I’m wrong) that they were offering it as a way to have all the benefits of federation - namely the assumption of FOSS adjacent services, but with all the “benefits” of corporate social media.

The truth is that it’s likely that Meta absolutely has had a detrimental effect on the fediverse because it has things that pull users away from the fediverse. Instagram has content. For days. And because the fediverse is small (shrinking as you say), and because it doesn’t have an algorithm that pushes certain content to certain users, Meta and the other services that have analogs in the fediverse continue to be popular.

A lot of this is because the fediverse still hasn’t figured out a way to be profitable to content creators and we no longer live in the early 2000’s of YouTube etc where content creation for free was popular.

I’d argue that a lot of the appeal of the fediverse is organic conversation and communication. The popularity of that as a whole is declining because of algorithms that tickle just the right feel good chemicals in our brains.

As for your comment about these corps investing in the fediverse? The only reason for them to do that is if they can make money off it. The major money making scheme the internet is relying on is ad service. So there’s a catch 22 here. I would rather donate money to fedi services than have the fediverse infested with ads.

I don’t want that. Part of the fediverse’s appeal for me is that people aren’t constant trying to sell me things on it.

While I can understand certain communities having "suggest a (game, service, product), for the most part I really don’t want to basically invite corps to think this is free real estate. And that’s exactly what I think this would do.

It’s seems like it would invite corps to basically astroturf Lemmy and the fediverse the way they’re doing with bot armies over on reddit.