Can you give any reasonable by means in which they could do this and succeed?

Read up on what they did to XMPP, an earlier federated protocol.

Spoiler: embrace, extend, extinguish.

Because it’s what we’ve come to expect from large corporations suddenly joining the table of any FOSS project that is adjacent to their financial stakes. Coexistence is possible if they can profit from the software without assimilating it, but it also stands to reason that they will be pushing for new interoperability standards that benefit their own business model at the expense of users in some way.

The lowest hanging fruit would be something that allows them to associate Fediverse accounts with users whose marketing data already exists in their database, or providing a service to third parties that helps them tie their own databases back to Fediverse users. This would require some sort of hook that encourages the users to either associate their Fediverse accounts to an existing Meta service, or otherwise volunteer common PII such as email address that can be cross referenced. Maybe some kind of tracking cookie that accomplishes the same.

Keep in mind that this is just an example, it is not necessarily the exact angle they are pursuing. I’m not in the automatically defederate camp, but a healthy amount of skepticism is definitely warranted.

——

Edit: Also worth a read: https://kbin.social/m/fediverse@lemmy.ml/t/83284/How-to-Kill-a-Decentralised-Network-such-as-the-Fediverse

So they can overwhelm it, when they become the majority of the users they become in charge with the loudest voice. Then they steer it their way or make sure it dies.

Imagining Meta wants to expand into another platform isn't a conspiracy theory. For one, Meta could paste ads into more online spaces. They could also replace twitter without having to develop their own platform or pulling a Musk. Both of these would, yes, allow them to be more profitable.

Let me give a hypothetical: Meta makes their own nice, QoL-rich instance that could integrate with Facebook/Instagram. They could also add in analytics and ads and allow that to federate with other instances. They could allow other people to host their own version of this Metadon. If it gets adopted (because it "just works" or otherwise), they could cut support for the instances not running Metadon, taking a large portion of the userbase with them. They would have their own twitter clone (complete with users), they hardly spent time developing it beyond loading Mastodon with their crap, and they would have other people also hosting Metadon (and their ads) without Meta paying a dime.

If Meta does get a sizable userbase then they can absolutely leverage that to force other instances to play their game or defederate.

I mean, look at EEE like Microsoft did in the 90s.

Personally, I'm also scared about Linux after Linus dies. They are on a lot of the board as well

https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

Someone else just posted this explanation. TLDR is essentially, one of these giant corporations can destroy a network by joining and then later walling off their own part of it. And it's been done before.