People keep posting that, but where that specific example breaks down is that xmpp requires network effects to work. You need your friends to use the same system and it's more person to person interaction.

They have a lot more leverage because if you want to talk to your friend, then you have to use their setup.

Link aggregators, forums, reddit, and lemmy/kbin work differently. Your friends use them but you probably don't interact directly.

It's about the community.

And I'm not really sure how Meta changes that. They are creating a thing for their Instagram users (using activitypub protocol??) and they are planning on allowing people to move their mastodon accounts over to their thing. Their thing that doesn't federate. It's a walled garden.

Those people, if they move, are required to follow Facebooks terms of service. Well no shit? You just moved to Facebook.

What's being forced on anyone?

If they "enhance" the protocol and attract people to their service...then what? You can't stop people from using a different service. Tildes could take off and pull people from the fediverse. Tildes could offer a service to import your account. How does that impact the rest of the fediverse??

Just keep using this. Build your community and carry on.