Meta is infamous for fostering insufferable users

With this I agree. 1.2bn users is way more noise than I want to experience and I will, personally block the domain. As a kbin user, you’ll have the tools available for that as well.

Secondly, it’s one thing to be visible to the internet in general, but to have anything tied to Meta that they can scrape and sell is a concern to me.

To think that the big companies that base their business models solely on datamining users already haven’t been mining the shit out of our data is a bit naive, I think. They don’t have to exploit vulnerabilities, make their presence known or launch huge products for it. All they (or anyone!) need is a $20/month linux VPS and a Mastodon installation. The fediverse does not have data privacy controls for content (beyond masking account e-mails/originator IPs).

Finally, almost every example of a large company joining a federation always ends with said company cannibalizing the federated networks

I agree. Threads got 10M signups yesterday and they haven’t even launched officially yet. They’re already larger than the entire fediverse.
Many people will switch to their app. And at some point, they will most likely make interoperability hard (so we have to adapt to their “bugs” instead of it being the other way around).

I just want to make clear that I’m in the “Defederate the shit out of them”-camp, but I also don’t think the fediverse is a place that puts privacy first - if privacy is your concern, then my advice is to stay away from fedi. For now.