I've been thinking about this in terms of Lemmy (also built on ActivityPub), which I understand isn't currently on the table for interop (but if Facebook is after Twitter's lunch, why shouldn't they be after Reddit's). It could even be the same application - Kbin is another AP service which has separate tabs for "link aggregation" and "microblogging" (Reddit and Twitter, respectively).
With Lemmy, the way a large corp could come in and push it around is by simply creating it's own version of the top 100 (or N, whatever) communities, and automatically subscribing users into them based on their interests (already known, due to existing accounts/profiles elsewhere). c/linux on lemmy.ml has ~6k subscribers, and is the largest Linux community on Lemmy, afaict. It's not unreasonable to think a large corp willing to pull in its existing userbase couldn't increase that by an order of magnitude in very short order. Overnight, those communities become the place where conversations are happening on those topics (maybe even with some pre-seeded content) and the existing lemmy communities stagnate.
Fast forward a while and one day BigCorp decides to pull the plug. Existing non-BigCorp Lemmy users are now separated from the communities they've been in and need to create BigCorp accounts. You could argue that those non-BigCorp Lemmy users are no worse off than they are pre-BigCorp-federation, but they're effectively migrating their communities all over again.
As far as why, I think it's pretty invaluable for Facebook to:
1) appear to be "playing ball" from a regulatory aspect 2) eat a competitor's lunch 3) control a (potentially!) up and coming federated service
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