Admittedly not a techie person, so anything on that side of things I can't speak to at all, but on the political side of the fence (politics is what you're describing) it seems like we're in the nation state building era of the fediverse. Lines are being drawn, borders created, and rules invented. I think it'll take some time for the dust to settle, but eventually we'll probably end up with several super large (relatively, anyway) instances, run by major players, probably corporate, and a bunch of little servers that are forced to either be niche communities unto themselves (think Cuba) or effectively vassal states of the larger instances (think Micronesia) or run by one of the larger ones, but semi independent (think Guam).

But honestly, I still think that's better than the alternatives. That sea of fediverse Cubas is just recreating forums in a new way, and I'd love to get back to that. And even if there are massive corporately run instances, it seems like you'll still have way more freedom than you currently do under the meta/reddit/Twitter climate. (With that caveat that I do not know things about tech, so maybe not?)

But no, despite lemmy being a reddit lookalike, or Mastodon being twitteresque, none of these are replacements for those. They're their own thing, that will evolve and become more and more distinct as time goes on. Hopefully anyway. I still like it here way better than Reddit, even aside from my personal feelings about open source software, political bullshit surrounding rich people and corps. I like the climate here, there's plenty of content, and I feel like I can have actual conversations again (like this one!) Instead of just me being baited by someone looking for karma like on reddit. Yes, I hope Reddit dies, and yes, I came to lemmy from reddit, but even if neither of those were the case, I still think it's nicer here, and that the model has potential. Again, I don't know shit about tech. For all I know this isn't super scalable. But from the view point of instances as states instead of email, I see it being pretty expandable. We just have to figure out how to prevent America from nuking anyone. :p