From the article:
"Moving to the Fediverse
This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge. A social network built on an open protocol can afford some host-agnosticism, and allow communities to persist even if individual hosts fail or start to abuse their power. Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to “spam”). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary, as we saw last fall when Twitter cracked down on discussions of its Fediverse-alternative, Mastodon."
Probably analyzed the Twitter population before and after the API change, and it seems Twitter survived, so they wish to replicate this.
Surviving is a pretty bad metric, especially for social media. Digg “survived”. So did MySpace, Tumblr, and more. It’s too soon to say about Twitter, but their future (in general) doesn’t look very bright. They aren’t going to disappear, but they also aren’t going to be the cultural powerhouse they used to be.
More importantly, the move needs to be profitable. On the surface, it is- 3rd party app users don’t currently bring in money. Converting any of them at all to paid or ad-viewing users yields a net profit, if you keep a narrow focus.
Having these users active and engaged on your platform has a value as well, but one that’s really hard to quantify.