Probably more taking a shot at mastodon and blue-sky. Blue-sky still hasn’t actually federated with the rest of the fediverse so I doubt whether threads will actually do what they are saying. maybe they are just using it as marketing. They wouldn’t make money from ads if people just used a mastodon instance to follow people on threads.
Personally I think they’d have to charge monthly for their curating algorithms. maybe one day there will be loads of small instances that each have their own bespoke curating systems that you can choose from.