...we already are all certified weirdoes. The average internet user doesn't have a single clue what Lemmy or Mastodon is. There isn't an Established Fediverse Institution that is household name for regular people on social media.

Meta could buy up lemmy.world and mastodon.social and they'd end up... exactly in the same place because most people who got into those got there to avoid big social media companies to begin with, and they'd jump ship immediately. This is the alternative social media movement. The people who are on established protocols are the ones who are already on Facebook and Twitter, and many don't even like those. They only stick around on those because everything else is too complicated for them.

Facebook and Twitter are today's social media GMail and Outlook equivalents. Lemmy and Mastodon are not.

People throw EEE around full of fear but it just sounds like it just became a sort of boogeyman mantra. It doesn't apply. There isn't some magic that can make Meta dominate a whole decentralized ecosystem like this. The only possible way for it to happen is if everyone decided to jump back there, but paradoxically because Fediverse users are so paranoid of even vaguely coexisting in an interconnected vicinity, the odds of that happening are zero.