Yes, Meta has more resources.
Recall that Compuserve, Microsoft (via MSN), and AOL all tried to position themselves as •competitors• to the Internet back when they were 900-pound gorillas and the Internet was still a bunch of universities, hobbyists, and garage-based startups.
Yes, I’m also concerned about what how Meta could throw their weight around. But headless entities like the Fediverse have a track record of being hard to kill.