I'm not too worried about Threads joining the metaverse. What Mark Zuckerberg has failed to realise is just how barebones his Twitter clone is.
Mastodon has support for trending topics and hashtags. Threads doesn't. Lacking such an absolutely basic feature that any microblogging platform would otherwise support is why Threads dropped from 500M active users to just a fraction of it.
I joined it near launch, made a few posts and then stopped. There is nothing worthwhile on Threads and I don't think leeching on to the fediverse.
Also, I can kinda understand why you all rushed to defederate from Gab when they tried to jump on the federation bandwagon, but not Meta.
Zuckerberg doesn't need us to overtake X. He needs to actually make a functional social media app first, then put more resources into moderating it.
X is still on top despite Elon Musk's stewardship because his competitors are either too small (most federated instances), require too big of a technical hurdle for the average Joe to use (the fediverse in general), or are downright incompetent (Threads.)