First off, there's nothing we can do about moving away from larger hosting Corporations, not with the technology we currently have. If we want to reach a national or international audience, we need infrastructure, and that has to come from somewhere; a business model makes sense. If you're hosting to a small community, you'd be able to get away with 1 selfhost, but to scale you'd need redundancies and bandwidth. The best choice we can make is the companies we would rather do business with. At this point, I'm definitely favoring Cloudflare and Azure (in that order) over AWS.

I would argue that the fractured - often openly hostile - intra-instance infighting on Lemmy feeds directly into OP’s image’s “this is too weird and scary” attitude.

I see this in a lot of comments about this so while I don't want to downplay the severity of this, I've personally never see instance in-fighting. Maybe it's the things I'm subscribed to, idk, but I usually visit both my local and all just to see what's going on. The Hexbear domain being sold is probably one of the first times I've run across discussions about other instances. Also, their domain being sold is lowkey hilarious. That was a problem as old as the internet (losing a domain). As we move to decentralization and privatization/ownership of data that's going to continue to be a thing I think.

Its the same intra-channel fighting we saw on Reddit,

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the intra-channel fighting - is it just disagreeable people commenting, or is it like "This community is better than that" or "This instance is better than that"? I often see discussions on Reddit, arguing, bad faith actors, but I wouldn't classify that as in-channel-fighting. idk.

There’s not a lot we can do about it individually.

Complain. JoinLemmy is Open Source on Github. If you have ideas - share them. If you take a look through their issues and feel like adding in your 2 cents, go for it.