The only reasonable explanation is to destroy it and eliminate future competition. Zuckerberg himself said it's better to buy a company than compete with it. He can't buy the Fediverse because it's FOSS and community driven, but it's vulnerable to "embrace, extent, extinguish". There's nothing built in to keep that from happening.
They don't have to own the fediverse, they can just charge for access to it. People who are happy with a superficial view, will pay with their data to have a window.
Maybe a technical infrastructure shortcut, a credibility boost with certain tech-literate folks, and a sop to (mostly EU) regulators about embracing (hmmm... and THEN what?) existing open standards. It could be all of them, but I am betting on mostly #3, like "See? Mastodon and ActivityPub exist so this is no different than when Google launched Gmail!"
There are lots of potential reason that vary from terrible to neutral. I can't imagine what's going on in Zuck's brain, thankfully, so I don't know if this is terrifying, or just a way to follow my racist aunt on Mastodon. Either way I don't exactly trust Facebook though, so I'd rather err on the side of caution and just defederate for now and see how it turns out.
It might be a way around IP. They are threatened of being sued by Twitter.
Lower infrastructure and maintenance costs. It fits the current scene of all tech companies suddenly getting paranoid and chasing immediate profits.
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