For what it's worth, I agree with your reading, and nobody has described what I consider to be a plausible scenario for how exactly "embrace, extend, extinguish" would actually work here.
I don't think Meta should be given the benefit of the doubt or anything and people may have differing opinions about the likely user base for Threads, but I don't think this is any real concern to the fediverse in general.
It doesn't seem at all plausible to me that meta threads will pull users away from mastodon/pleroma/misskey/etc. though. If they "extend" the federation protocol to the point they become incompatible with the rest of these implementations, they will just go away and we're back to where we were before they started federating.
I'm actually kinda waiting a few releases to start promoting my instance anywhere, letting some other brave instance admins work the kinks out a bit first.
It always seemed like a dubious integration to me, done because it could be done and not really because it made sense. Even if they federate using the same protocol, they are different applications. I don't think it hurts, but yeah, the best way to follow and engage with federated microblogs will be via federated microblog software, and the best way to engage with federated link aggregation/forums will be federated link aggregators.
Though I suppose kbin is attempting to support both fully with separate workflows, so that might turn into a decent all-in-one solution.
You're probably already aware of this, but now Pirate Weather (http://pirateweather.net/en/latest/) offers a Dark Sky style API. I honestly don't get amazing accuracy from it for my area, but it's not awful.
I've been seeing this lately too. The workaround I've found is changing the sort to something like New or Hot, then it becomes a button. Of course, then I only have about a 10% chance of it not being stuck at "subscription pending."
https://lemmyverse.net/ has been invaluable to me as someone running a very low member-count (for now?) instance. This is a directory of communities on all known instances.
For what it's worth, I agree with your reading, and nobody has described what I consider to be a plausible scenario for how exactly "embrace, extend, extinguish" would actually work here.
I don't think Meta should be given the benefit of the doubt or anything and people may have differing opinions about the likely user base for Threads, but I don't think this is any real concern to the fediverse in general.