Eh, I think rejecting anything associated with Meta seems perfectly normal for people trying to get away from corporate social media.

My unpopular opinion is that we should federate with threads. "Embrace extend extinguish" would depend on existing fediverse users migrating to threads. Quite frankly, I don't see that happening. In fact, if there's no federation, there's more incentive to use threads to have a presence.

Embrace extend extinguish, if done on the fediverse, may cause an uptick in signups on other instances, and when extinguished, a portion of those users would leave.

With the Google Chat / XMPP thing, people were using Google Chat, had xmpp support, it was cool, then google pulled the rug so users seemingly dropped.

I don't think Meta has enough goodwill at all to even convince it's own users to return to it's platforms these days. I think Bluesky is more of a risk as it claims to be decentralised to rope people in, but isn't.