Fediverse

As for living with Meta: I've been living fine without Meta for almost a decade now. If Meta fucks up the fediverse, I live without the fediverse. Easy peasy. I genuinely don't comprehend this whole defeatist attitude. "Well, it sucks, but we have to use it." No. No you fucking don't. You can just, you know, not use it. It really is that simple.

Maybe it's the fact I spent my formative years without the Internet being a thing that has me not think of Internet services as essential-cannot-live-without-OMG things.

There are users to be had.

You're still stuck in the mindset of surveillance capitalism. To an instance, users are a cost item, not a profit item. Meta/Alphabet/et al want all teh yoozers because that's where they siphon up the data that makes them their money. Users are a small cost item compared to the income they get from that data.

A Mastodon or Calckey or Lemmy or whatever instance doesn't make bank from having a huge user count. There's no incentive to vacuum up all teh yoozers.