@veronika I'm going to push back against points 5 and 6.

The Fediverse (Mastodon is but one aspect) has received funding while you weren't looking. Mastodon has received money from the EUnomia Project and has been the main force behind a 'standard' colloquially referred to as the 'Mastodon API'. Every other Fediverse platform, such as Pleroma and Misskey, has to comply with said 'standard' in order to guarantee some level of inter-operability even if some of the design decisions are backwards.

Pleroma has also received funding as well, but is not fully transparent or traceable. It's believed freelancer work was paid for by Leonid Radvinsky, the guy behind MyFreeCams. I'll spare the details, but the point is the implication that these platforms were built by volunteers doesn't tell the full story. It was originally to advance federated social networking beyond Friendica, Identica, GNU Social and pump.io, but somehow became a big deal when ActivityPub became a W3C Recommendation in 2018.

On your other point, the Fediverse was a means of getting away from platforms out to make you the product through advertising, brands and 'influencers'. Those who've been around long enough to see this space rise to prominence have also seen communities homogenised, thanks to Mastodon specifically, when the first media wave in 2016 hit. People then were using the platform like Twitter, such as Will Wheaton, who disappeared weeks later. Andrew Yang made the Fediverse an outreach platform for his election campaign in 2020, only to disappear after he was eliminated. Another thing to keep in mind is the #FediBlock crowd who make it an aim to defederate from 'problematic' targets, basically creating their own bubble and defeating the point of being here.

As a wise instance admin once said, we were here before you and will be here to see you leave. Treating this space as a means of 'filling a niche' and 'establishing a presence' is what made platforms like Twitter insufferable in the first place; a sense of inorganic interactions and using the public square to sell yourself as someone who's supposed to be important. We have our own e-celebs here but it's because they're actually interesting, they didn't need to advertise themselves to us about why they deserve our attention.

TL;DR - Have meaning discussions, make friends, foster a community. Stop self-indulging over the thought you must be 'somebody' here. We don't give a fuck.