[blackpill0w]

>Social networks and platforms that people use to talk to each other should never have been dominated by profit-seeking businesses in the first place.

Well, someone needs to pay for the infrastructure needed to run those platforms, I don't think that relying on donations is a good long term strategy, especially when the platforms grows. Also, having knowledge of people's opinions, preferences, likes and dislikes sure attracts some people.

>Federated alternatives like Lemmy and Kbin that put community interests first look promising, and could very well be the future.

I am not sure about this one, federated social networks may have the same community divided across multiple instances, but maybe someone could implement a client which allows you to group communities from multiple instances under one label? This sounds like a reasonable solution to me but I don't know much about the inner workings of federated social platforms.