Convince the population at large it doesn’t work, or even that it’s dangerous.
Like community run utilities, universal healthcare, or any number of things that so obviously work better without a profit motive
Make the populace at large see the fediverse as a failed experiment, a hive of criminal activity, or a bunch of tiny toxic echo chambers
Hell, they could even push legislation that makes running social media out in the open impossible for individuals
By convincing people at large that social media run by individuals or groups isn’t viable.
Personally, I’d do it by attacking the credibility of the admins. Sow doubt. “they only run servers so they can steal your data”, “look at this guy! He pretends he cares about free speech, but he’s abusing his power to censor and radicalize people!” “The only reason you’d use these private instances is if you have something to hide. That place is for criminals”
They might even be able to get legislation passed to make it legally risky to run the servers in the US if they control the narrative
Only early adopters, technical people, and the privacy minded care about how this actually works, and we’ve been telling our friends and family how bad Facebook is for years (for good reason). At first they didn’t care, but now I get push back
Next, make it unreliable. If it goes down frequently, gets flooded by bots, or just starts to suck in general, most of the people here now will leave, no matter how important federated social networks are. Maybe they’ll go to servers that bend over backwards to become offshoots of threads, maybe they’ll look for Reddit clones elsewhere, personally I’d start up a private federation for friends and family if this goes south
Regardless, this place will become an empty mall - if it’s not a healthy form of social media I’m not going to spend much time here, and I’m extremely passionate about it
And the last option is just ads and incentives. Make it tempting and play to fomo.
They’ll probably do all of this to some degree, especially if we explode in numbers and present actual competition.
We’re ready to handle it, but we also need to make sure the battle lines are as far away as possible