My problem is a smaller Lemmy/Mastodon/fediverse means no niche communities. For example, I want to chat about all the individual specific video games I've played and I can't reasonably do that if there aren't sufficient people on Lemmy to do that with.

As for integration vs no integration with corporation's bittersweet pill I don't know my stance in that case. I seem to be getting conflicting information on how healthy this would be for the fediverse. Whatever gets me my niche topic chats, in a solid and usable UI, while avoiding corporate data harvesting, advertising, and political manipulation is what I want.