"It's not our evil plan, you people are already doing it" is the typical argument for Divide and Conquer. Unsurprisingly they bring that argument too:
"For instance, fediverse advocate and co-editor of ActivityPub Evan Prodromou @evan created a paid Mastodon account (@evanplus) that users could subscribe to for $5 per month to gain access. If he’s on board with paid content, surely others would follow."
(the irony being of course that Evan did this with standard ActivityPub, no changes needed)
ben
futureisfoss