The problem is, a lot of the platforms that I've liked over the years have been vacuumed up. I still try to use different ones, but it's a lot harder.

This is a little atomistic view, but essentially in the correct direction. I would also add we need to nurture anti-centralization and anti-corporate sentiments that are still springing up in younger people especially, in their own way. If alternatives could bestow perceived social prestige for at least parts of the population, this would help preserve islands of free discourse for the future.

To be sure, this doesn't mean proclaiming decentralization to be cool necessarily (...fellow kids), but trying to be open-minded and friendly to the public, which I consider to be the actual better part of the ethos of the early Internet era. Being tech literate is "esoteric" by itself, and some complexities and social contracts cannot be really taken away from that, not without going back under the centralized yoke. But even moreso we should be trying to make it a little better by our attitude.

Even if a regulation of protocols for utilities will come, assuming it will be good, we need society to remain willing to preserve it.