Trump removes inspector general overseeing $2 trillion coronavirus relief package days after he was appointed: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/07/coronavirus-relief-trump-removes-inspector-general-overseeing-2-trillion-package.html

Inspectors general warn that Trump administration is blocking scrutiny of coronavirus rescue programs: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/15/inspector-general-oversight-mnuchin-cares-act/

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.

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

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.

Allowing bad actors to advertise themselves is highlighting them. Banning them and deleting their communities is the opposite of highlighting them.

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.

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.

• Most corners are more rounded by default, especially buttons, which are pills now instead of rectangles. You could make them pills before and they offered examples showing how to do it, but hardly anyone did.
• Buttons are a little bigger, and there's a little more padding between most things.
• There are more transition effects, making apps feel a bit more fluid and "interesting", in a good way, I think.
• Nav bars and rails do a much better job of highlighting the active item, by adding a pill-shaped background behind it. (This one addresses a frequent complaint that I received when using material components on websites.)
• The rest is somewhere between "exactly the same" and "really minor", but the minor changes vaguely contribute to a different feel from before.

I can't see why they would. Apple doesn't care about you, but they probably do care about retaliation from the French government.

Antitheists oppose religion, not gods. I'm an atheist because there's no reason to believe that anything supernatural exists, and I'm an antitheist because I think belief without evidence is inherently harmful.

"Interchangeable" isn't quite the right word, because they're different software with different features, but they share content, which is the most important part.

You can easily try both and choose the one you like better. Or if there's an app you want to use but it only supports one service, it's probably a good reason to choose that one. I might switch myself once sync for lemmy is ready.