Meta isn’t going to “buy anyone out” if they’re federated. They’ll just turn your instance into a portal into threads for everyone using your instance, then force your users to join threads by killing the link. Meta bought insta and whatsapp because they were completely unfederated alternatives to facebook that were gaining traction that facebook could not kill.

Smothering your competitor is always preferable to buying them out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H27rfr59RiE

I was there and I was using XMPP. Interacting with google chat slowly became the purpose of xmpp. Everyone who was using xmpp eventually found themselves talking mostly to google users. Then Google killed the link and every xmpp instance instantly became useless.

We can (and are) building a community without facebook. Or we can link to facebook and find that they quickly through sheer mass become the center of the lemmy community. And then comes the knife.