this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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My reading of that isn't that Google killed XMPP, it's that they thought XMPP would be useful for the userbase they brought in, they realised it wasn't, and they ditched it. There's no indication that XMPP had the userbase and lost it to Google, or even that XMPP had features that were stolen by Google
The point is simple, the moment you have the biggest chunk of the userbase, you have more weight in establishing praxis for standards & protocols. In fact, the protocol needs to catch up with you, rather than viceversa. Google did the same with Chrome, for example. Try to start a browser today, and with all the stuff that Google forced into standards and that your browser need to comply with, you will fail. Even just forcing a pace in changes to ActivityPub can mean that a number of tools that are developed by volunteers won't be able to keep up.
Imagine Meta brings in 100m users. This is a fraction of their userbase, but it is 8x the whole fediverse. Imagine now that they make some change that doesn't comply with ActivityPub, what do you do, break the tool that is used by the 90% of the users, or adapt? And what if they push changes to ActivityPub, so that everyone needs to catch up quickly: lemmy, mastodon, pixelfed, etc. How soon before some tools with less active development will die because non-compliant? (Similarly to how some browser break with some sites)
For what it's worth, I agree with your reading, and nobody has described what I consider to be a plausible scenario for how exactly "embrace, extend, extinguish" would actually work here.
I don't think Meta should be given the benefit of the doubt or anything and people may have differing opinions about the likely user base for Threads, but I don't think this is any real concern to the fediverse in general.