tl;dr I propose a Fedi Union consisting of the developers of Phanpy, Pixelfed, Peertube, Lemmy, and PieFed. That will work as a way to fund all of the services collectively (with the option to still go to their individual patreons and fund them seperately) and as a way for them to communicate to help all the services be more compatible.
The only way to stop Meta taking over the Fedi is by making better apps than them. Defederating from threads as the sole defense mechanism is a fools errand. They are migrating their Billion+ users from instagram to Threads, the couple million mastodon users defederating from them won't hurt them. Yes we might think who cares if they have billions of users on Threads we will stay on mastodon servers that defederate with them but realistically there will be times we need to check stuff posted there if the biggest content creators, journalists, gamedevs, artists, youtubers, are posting their work there which they will do because they want to reach large audiences and because Threads will provide a way to monetize their work.
Threads is also being designed to take over Reddit\Lemmy next. Something no one has talked about is the fact that only one # is allowed in a post on Threads. This seems small but its actually huge because once launch their Reddit\Lemmy view every post on Threads with a # will be shown as a post on the subreddit/community with the name of that # and every like will be an upvote. Once this happens there will be times when specific niche communities and useful information will be stuck on their platforms. (like sometimes we still have to google for something with the word reddit to find useful information for something specific)
The only actual way to compete with them is to, well, compete and do a better job. Compare the official Mastodon app with Threads or any other mastodon app. The official app STILL doesn't have grouped notifications, threaded replies, or quote posts. It is barely compatible with any other ActivityPub service (Mastodon basically EEE activitypub but thats a thread for another day). The Mastodon devs are very hostile to the broad activitypub community. They don't work with devs of other services, they don't accept PRs, and they're deadset on sticking to Ruby and being nothing more than a Twitter clone. Mastodon is by far the biggest activitypub app which makes them essentially lead the rest of the space.
We need a Fedi Union where the developers of the different services work together so the services are fully compatible and so the community can fund the Fedi Union so devs outside the official team have the money to focus on development. The Mastodon team is getting around $30,000 a month and they haven't added a new feature in months (years?) meanwhile:
The sole developer of Phanpy (a mastodon app) has launched everything mastodon has and more (instant translation on home feed, boost carousel, threaded replies, Catch Up ui, new media focused view)
The sole developer of Pixelfed (an instagram competitor) has also developed Loops (a tiktok competitor), Sup (a WIP whatsapp competitor), and PubKit a toolkit for activitypub developers.
the two (main) develops of Lemmy have made the second largest ActivityPub service that is already a fleshed out competitor to reddit and has a huge community of developers making frontends and apps and now a WIP wiki as well.
I propose a Fedi Union consisting of the developers of Phanpy, Pixelfed, Peertube, Lemmy, and PieFed. That will work as a way to fund all of the services collectively (with the option to still go to their individual patreons and fund them seperately) and as a way for them to communicate to help all the services be more compatible.
You seem to keep looking at this as the admin of your self hosted instance with only you as the only user. With large instances there comes the responsibility of moderation and that is a thing that Gargron has been lacking with years ago. And keeping the door open for new sign-ups while the idea of Federation is to decentralize, and people repeatedly asking you to show new users to other instances but not doing so is just plain horrible imho.
Sure, so long as it comes with the responsibility of the users to pay, they get to have a say in moderation.
Otherwise, they get to vote with their browser: Use the site if they like it, do not use it if they don't. And the same for the software. Don't like Mastodon, use another microblogging software.
This is the key underlying idea behind the federation of activitypub. Do not undermine it. This is not Reddit, or Twitter, or whatever. This is not a central place, it does not need central evolution, vote by abandonment.
(and I'm not saying I agree with Mastodon's dev, seeing how I couldn't give a rat's ass about microblogging in general, but again, it's his instance, everyone is free to use whatever they agree with)