@atomicpoet
The fediverse can't *beat* Meta (or whichever giant corp) to be the dominant social media network, but it can always *survive* Meta/whoever, as long as there are some people who want to use it. Nothing can stop people from running instances and connecting to others' instances, even if there aren't many of them. Nothing to do with "deserving" anything or not.

>"If certain people believe that the Fediverse is in need of centralization, well, why are they here?"
- Like I say, that set of people are here while they're waiting until the next big Twitter-like alternative comes along. Some of them hope(d) Mastodon could become that for them and have been trying to get Mastodon to implement more of Twitter's features to make it into (what they consider) a viable replacement for it, and some of that work might happen, but inevitably corporate interests will take over that niche, because that's what the masses will move to.