Yeah, getting closer with fibre allows better speeds. Copper is susceptible to so many issues like corrosion, interference, water inundation, and signal degradation. Lasers down a fibre are way more stable, have far less drop off, are way more resistant to water ingress, and have the benefit of future proofing. We currently use the best lasers we can but laser technology is really early in it's development. Lasers from 50 years in the future should be able to use the same fibre without issue and pack many more bits per second with different frequencies of light, overlapping signals, better processing, more coherent light with less deviation, and so on.
I think it is like rail, you spend a fair bit putting in rail and you can run trains on it for 100s of years. Roads are fragile, rails are sturdy and solid, and while trains have changed a lot over the years moving from coal to diesel to electric, but the rail system itself is something you can use with all those trains to move more and more stuff more efficiently over time. Good infrastructure leads to good outcomes.
True, but privacy conscious people tend to also be wary of concentrations of power in a platform, such as Reddit or Twitter. If you are aware of the issues with a closed system you tend to also be aware of privacy issues, security issues, state censorship, and so on, so the user base is more aware in the fediverse and if they are leaving for Reddit that really does say something. I won't be using their service, I feel very lucky to have found out about this before shifting as I was in the process of finding a stable email host and blending with the VPN seemed financially reasonable, guess I will stay with Mullvad and get a separate email provider.