limit what applications they can launch
what websites they can visit
how much screen time they spend in an app or category of apps
disable in app purchases
disable pop up advertisements in app
require approval from parent account for any app download (including free)
remove ability to delete apps or change specific settings

Google family link gives you controls over:

Android app activity and limits
Filters on Chrome, including custom black and whitelisting for websites
SafeSearch to remove sexually explicit and violet results in Google Search
Usage limits, including individual app limits
Google Play purchases, content restrictions, approval for app installs
Google Assistant app access and voice matching
Location tracking to find your child's device
Account info
Google Photo sharing
Google account sign in controls across new devices
Activity control such as web and YouTube history

source Seems like rather similar options to me?
But I have to admit to never having used either anyway.

yeah, it doesn't destroy anything on the worldwide scale.
but it weakens.

erosion is a rather perfect term for it

Several players have said they’ll exit the UK rather than exit encryption.

rightly so.

I'd assume any worldwide player couldn't be caught in compliance with this, as long as alternatives exist that don't.
This might have been enough to push EU people away from WhatsApp for example.

I mean, imagine if non-british companies just went "well, no encryption for you, then."

And disabled TLS too.

Online Banking would probably just have to... stop.
And a lot of other pages wouldn't load on most browsers requiring https

Depends.

If he thinks Twitter is irreperably dying, this may be a way, in which he can get out of repaying the loans he used to (partially) fund the buyout of twitter.

yeah, well, even the @twitter account now has the X logo.

x.com redirects to twitter.com as well.

Wonder if Businesses will replace the twitter logo in their windows as well.

This is why we need Firefox.

And Firefox needs to be a market that can't be ignored.

The issue is once you open these floodgates you’re not going to be able to close them, at least not without alienating a vast majority of users on both sides.

I mean, users of Meta producs are already plenty alienated from Lemmy etc, aren't they?

once meta gains the majority of users and content on its instances (and this is really more of a “when”, not “if” situation)

I mean, it's a matter of... minutes? hours?, probably not days even.
That's why I'd like to be able to talk to them.

they can start making changes to AP and overall infrastructure and forcing other instances to either adapt to that, or get left behind one by one, similar to what google does regardless of W3C and other browsers have to adapt even though it goes against the agreed standard.

And I agree that these are very very dangerous. I wouldn't say they could only be bad, but still.
Anyway, not following bad changes by meta would leave people where?
Exactly where they are right now.
In that case, Meta joining the fediverse would have been a failed experiment.

it’s going to be the email situation all over again, we’ll have just a few large trusted providers and the rest will be a seemingly unsafe niche that most people avoid.
I have to say... That seems like a win though.

Billions of people using interoparable software to talk to each other. Email is a brilliant success!
Yes, having "few" larger instances isn't great, but on the other hand most companies run their own email server, and those talk fine with anyone else.
Doesn't seem like a terrible result to me.
Much rather "the Email situation" than the "whatsapp situation" or "signal situation" or "facebook situation" or "reddit situation" or "instagram situation" or "tiktok situation" where you have to join that specific thing to talk to people.

meta can already freely pull that data from any instance
ActivityPub baby!

I agree. The Beautiful thing here would be that people sick of Meta could still go to fosstodon, and they could still talk to their niece on Metas Threads.

I can't help but see that as a win for the people not on metas software.

There seems very little incentive for Meta to federate with anyone, except good faith, right?
They'll double the Fediverse Userbase in an hour, or less.

I disagree.

I hope there'll be people discussing sensibly.
For example the question how the rest of the fediverse would like Meta to act, when / if they have the by far largest instance on Fediverse with Threads.
Should they Rate-Limit queries from their users to other Instances, as to not overload them? This would protect other instances, but make the federated experience worse, driving more people to threads.
Would the Fediverse rather that Meta mirrors images etc on their servers too, or pull those from the original server?
Maybe they have UX ideas that would be useful to have somewhat uniform (like the subreddit/community/magazine stuff here), and would like input on them.

Of course just blocking them is an option for the fediverse, but doing that blindly seems like a missed opportunity for both sides.
More freely available content would be great, wouldn't it?

Maybe they have Ideas on the protocol, that they want to talk with admins about as a first step to gain more perspective. And certainly they are likely to be data-hungry greedy shit, but there is a chance that they are actually good ideas - there are actual people working at meta after all.

There's tons of ways in which this could be useful, and I don't really understand the completely blocking approach I see a lot of.
They want to use ActivityPub, that's awesome, finally something new and big that uses an open freaking standard on the web. What are the downsides? If it sucks for communities they can easily block Meta.
Yes, Meta is not a Company working for the betterment of the world, certainly.
But maybe, just maybe, goals align here, and Meta can make money and improve the Fediverse and the Internet with it. And certainly, maybe they want to "take over" ActivityPub, and that would indeed be bad.
So, if they want to change the Protocol, be very, very wary of their proposals. But even there there they could just want reasonable improvements because they suddenly deal with 100x of the next biggest instances.

tl;dr: when you tell people what you'd like them to do, it increases the chances of them doing that.