I think for a lot of mastodon users it's more about being part of a specific ideologically aligned in-group than it is about anything else (this post touches on a lot of stuff that makes overtures to that).

The irony to me is that any chance of relevance for a protocol is obviously going to need big players like meta to sign up (and that's a good thing for the protocol).

A weird set of circumstances might have aligned where meta sees an advantage in being part of a federated protocol to commoditize a threat to themselves (twitter, bluesky, etc.) and still hold a dominant position in quality of the end user clients (which is the only thing 99% of users care about).

It's a little funny a lot of the mastodon hosts are up in arms about this, but not that surprising when considering what they're actually getting out of being part of it (the identity stuff that comes along with being a mastodon user).

I'd guess similar stuff was said during the eternal september era of the web itself - simply being an internet user was no longer an identity that meant something culturally specific.