I’d say it’s more hopping on the buzzword train and maybe even following through. Although you can check my comment history I don’t much about this federation and instance stuff I don’t see how a for profit company finds a home in a non profit whatever-lemmy-is. Plus on top of that even if they somehow did become prominent I’m sure all the lemmy admins would eventually great a single server or small network servers that are private from meta

They have other ways to gain aside from data collection. Manipulation of public opinion is another possibility.

It’s directly attacking twitter and eee fediverse.

I’m not an expert on how the social media make money, but from what i know it is created upon the information they gather (either personnal information or content, that they can then sell to advertisers or thing like that). So the more data they collect, the more they are able to sell i guess ? And i think that because fediverse already generates data for free (and will do so more and more), people in the business of selling this kind of data are eager to get access it Only my humble opinion, not sure at all if this is theway it works