There are probably several reasons, many not entirely clear to any one of us now, but one can guess.

I think not an insignificant reason for this is the coming expansion of the EU Digital Markets Act where Meta among a few other tech giants are labeled as gatekeepers. As always, while the EU might be one of the earlier ones, other markets will likely follow in the coming decade.

Meta will going forward be forced to open up their platforms and incorporate interoperability with other services. It starts with messages, but knowing the EU, that is probably just the first stepping stone.

If Meta have to do it anyways, they will probably want to make sure that they are the first one in establish a strong presence in the technology that every other tech giant will also need to embrace.

I don’t think they care even a little about the present Fediverse community, what they do care about is the technology that Apple, Microsoft, Google, TikTok and so on will agree on to use going forward. By embracing ActivityPub early, they are betting on having already a strong position when these companies are inevitably going to have to try to agree on a common standard.

Yeah it’s always a project to get new people started with Mumble. It doesn’t feel like it should be so difficult, but people always struggle.

Ironically, I struggled immensely with forcing Discord to stop messing with my system audio settings, which is apparently something apps are allowed to do in Windows.

The IT tech industry isn’t doing great currently. Everything was fine as long as there were a practically infinite amount of money going around, but lately investors have been increasingly demanding signs of profitability over “limitless” expansion and growth.

That’s why a lot of companies have been doing these seemingly drastic changes lately. It may absolutely result in long term damages, but that is not their main concern at the moment. In some cases this is also somewhat a moment for these companies to show their cards and prove that they actually deserve the evaluation that they been given. I suspect that there will be quite a lot of agitated people in the coming months and years.

I really wanted something similar so I threw a quick and dirty tampermonkey script together to fetch the subscriptions from the settings page. I think it worked out pretty alright.

Edit: Someone else can probably do something a lot better, but here is the code: https://pastebin.com/P0mR9QL6

Paste it into a new script and call the addSubscriptionsSidePanel() function to run it.

Edit2: I’ve uploaded it to Greasy Fork so that you can install it directly: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469139-kbin-subscriptions-panel