I agree. There’s also just no reason to give Meta the benefit of the doubt here. Bug or not they’ve done nothing to earn such a charitable response from anyone.
I have to feel like Meta gives absolutely zero fucks and is completely unthreatened by PixelFed. PF has ~21k active users and Facebook alone has ~3 Billion.
Seems far more likely that this is just the result of exactly the kind of garbage automated moderation one should expect from Meta than any sort of suppression of "competition". What would they gain from that, other than exactly this type of negative publicity?
Not only is PixelFed not a competitor in terms of users, but the dev is desperate to cooperate and welcome Meta to the Fediverse. So it doesn't represent any kind of threat for the company's goals, at least at the moment.
See how quick he was in defending meta after they came with the bug excuse and how quickly he's adding threads to the fediverse datebase to the point that the clone of Zuckerberg's account that cannot even fully interact yet is called "the most popular fediverse account"
They've demonstrated that they have a global blacklist of terms, and that some competing services are on it. It could have been an accident (though I'm not sure how), but it certainly wasn't a bug. The blacklist is clearly working just fine.