Not a huge surprise there is a large anti-capitalist faction on lemmy, so this isn't terribly surprising.
I'm no meta apologist, they've done enough to warrant skepticism. The reality is they can harvest the data even if you defederate their main instance, by setting up shadow instances or just scraping other instances, so that argument doesn't really hold water for defederation. The bigger one is content vs spam coming from their instances and possible EEE measures, but immediate defederation only serves to keep them siloed off and does not let them function as an offramp to better instances for regular users.
I hadn't heard that stag from Twitter, but I really do hope that is how it is on reddit and that the content generating users have begin making the switch. Sadly, I think some of reddit recent rise in popularity attracted some folks there only for views so they'll probably stay. Hopefully their content isn't much to miss.
The difference is here you can manage your own feed and pick and choose. Many folks don't want metas apps on their device but wouldn't mind some of the content. Folks that don't want it don't have to sub but those that do can benefit second hand.
This is by design. They've got us arguing about the api price, when their goal was to kill off third party apps and get all users on their app so they can data mine us. And the ridiculous api price is a secondary bonus for them, since AI and LLM companies will gladly pay it to sick up the content on the platform.
I'm a big user user of weather.gov, but curious what you mean by blaming weather service for this not being convenient?