Why do you think a large corporation would just share their content to people who aren't viewing their ads?
They're not just being generous. Corporations are not benevolent. So what are they expecting to get from it?
Here's the answer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
It's not easier for them, and once there's enough people to matter then it's too late to kill it. The fediverse is growing, and they want to stop that before the fediverse is big enough to matter.
that is happening regardless and is not a harm that is a result of federation
Yes, it is. Read this: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
There goal is to launch a twitter competitor with a lot of users and make money off advertising.
They can do that without integrating with the fediverse. The reason they're going to integrate with the fediverse is to embrace, extend, and extinguish.
People have articulated all kinds of actual harms, including two possibilities in the OP, but frankly they're irrelevant.
We know what Meta's goals are, and we know they have absolutely no moral standards whatsoever. Exactly how they try to accomplish those goals doesn't matter. We shouldn't give them the opportunity to try anything.
We should be scared of Meta, and we should keep them as far away as possible. Anything else is reckless and stupid at best.
Unfortunately it's pretty much impossible to support Nvidia on Linux unless you have a large enough team to test each of their GPUs individually and find workarounds for all of the bugs. Their Linux drivers are really bad.
The bigger projects have been able do that, but if it's a relatively new project with only a handful of people working on it, and it's not used on the steam deck, there's basically no chance it'll support Nvidia.
EEE wouldn't work on something that is popular. The whole point is to destroy it before it becomes popular. Furthermore, corporations aren't okay with smaller alternatives existing at all. Their goal is to have a monopoly. Finally, Mastodon's growth has been really impressive for the last couple years, so I'm certain that other social media companies are looking for ways to shut them down.
The "gatekeeper" theory has some merit too, but not in that way. You can find the definition of a "gatekeeper" on the European Commission's website and I don't see how federation would affect it at all. That said, gatekeepers are required to "allow end users to install third party apps or app stores that use or interoperate with the operating system of the gatekeeper", and federation would meet that criteria.
Still, we already saw Twitter and Reddit move to paid APIs, and apparently that doesn't violate the DMA, so it's hard to believe that Meta would use a more open protocol without some other motivation.