Meta threads will open federation to the fediverse soon, and while this is mainly to mastodon it will still affect lemmy. They are acting like they won’t be evil, but let’s be real this is Facebook when have they ever done that.
This article which has been trending lately explains some of the issues. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
This comment here is a simple analogy if you can’t be bothered reading the article. https://lemmy.ca/comment/5702922
You could think of some mad version of the AGPL that requires software that interoperates with yours to open its source, but I doubt it would fly in court.
Patenting an open standard (like activity pub) sound like an oxymoron.