Let's stick to the facts here and not opinions, gossip or rumour. The timeline of events is right here. (and I hope a friendly mod comes along and pins this)
Between June 12th and June 15th: Meta employees have been meeting with admins of large Mastodon servers, including at least Eugen Rochko (Mastodon CEO, admin of mastodon.social and mastodon.online) and Byron Miller (admin of universeodon.com). This meeting was under NDA, and seems to have mainly centered around discussing the app P92.
June 15th: information about the meeting, and the signing of an NDA, starts to spread around the feeds.
June 18th: @vantablack starts the fedipact, a place where admins can sign that indicate that their server will not federate with Meta’s servers.
June 23rd: @kev, admin of fosstodon.org shows an email where admins of Mastodon servers get invited to a roundtable meeting with Meta, as well as his response declining the meeting.
June 23rd: Alex Heath reports for The Verge on the issue. He reports that “Meta plans to introduce this phase [ActivityPub support] about three months after the initial release.”
June 27th: An off-the-record roundtable meeting between Meta and Mastodon server admins is planned.
Note that there is zero mention of "a deal", "an exchange", "a transaction" (pick your preferred terminology) or "gifts" as alluded to in the Medium link (which IMO is trash - anyone can write an article on Medium and scream 'doom and gloom', should we really accept that as valid journalism?) and alluded to by the OP. That simply did not happen and that is fake news.