Welcome!

FWIW- I agree Spez deserves a thanks for seeding this platform up to critical mass. And I also think he may deserve a thanks for continuing to turn Reddit into a meme scroller- that will keep a lot of the idiots from making the jump. Very sad to see the platform I loved and spent many years on turn into little more than a filter for idiots, but if the answer is that the fediverse becomes what Internet forums once were, and Reddit was for a long time, then change comes as the world turns.

feels much more like the old world again, when individual people not huge companies would own the web.

I miss that era- when it wasn't all big tech platforms for everything, when your online friend group would more likely be a forum or an IRC, and where experimentation was encouraged. Where if you had a spare laptop and a cable modem that meant you could run your community's IRC bot or Shoutcast server or TeamSpeak relay or whatever. And where nobody gave a flying fuck what was acceptable content to advertisers- some places took that too far, but it meant the Internet as a whole wasn't sanitized to be advertiser-friendly.
I don't know if it will last, but for now, all this fediverse stuff feels like that did. The tech isn't 100% perfect, hasn't been through 15 UX committees to ensure Grandma can figure it out, but it's accessible to everyone and if you want to fuck with it or help build it or run it on your old laptop, you're welcomed rather than ignored.