So how do people go about defederating? Is it just a matter of making new servers, or does it require anything else?
I'm happy to stand up against The Man, but it seems like once the masses get involved they don't feel personally responsible to preserve what they enjoy. They seem to give general consensus to [Big Tech Company], then [hard-working FLOSS developer] comes in later to fix it.
If I'm going to get "political" here, I almost think people need to be sold more on the importance of self-reliance. One prior historical precedent was around the 1750's about taxation, and that's had a nearly non-trivial impact on society. People intuitively grasp land ownership, so it should translate to data ownership as well.
Your reasoning touches on a deep philosophical concept: what is "ownership"?
I'd say owning something is easy enough when you can't duplicate it (I can't just copy your car or house to save money). Duplication, however, means the ownership is technically the abstraction of "intellectual property", which worked fine when duplicating cost money and people paid money for it.
However, the very essence of using a computer on a network is simply using copies. You're not reading this as I write it, but a copy your computer downloaded.