This website contains age-restricted materials including nudity and explicit depictions of sexual activity.
By entering, you affirm that you are at least 18 years of age or the age of majority in the jurisdiction you are accessing the website from and you consent to viewing sexually explicit content.
You’re severely underestimating the budget Meta can throw at this. Mastodon/Lemmy/etc. right now are largely volunteer-run as opposed to full-time employees.
That argument suggests open source products couldn’t possibly compete with a closed-source alternative.
They can compete of they have the manpower to do so. Lemmy has literally only 2 devs. How many devs can Meta pay to work on Threads and outpace it?
Threads isn’t a Lemmy competitor - it competes with Mastodon
But they can easily implement Lemmy-like features on it or make another sister-app. It isn’t hard to bruteforce such things when you have that much money and developers