I mean, I consider Mastodon pretty “customizable” in the sense that you state. It’s easy to follow individual hashtags surrounding specific topics, groups that people use to post about a specific topic or individual users. My home timeline is pretty much all topics I’m interested in due to who and what I follow.

Similar to Lemmy really. Your subscribed feed should be exclusively topics that interest you from the communities you subscribe to.

If you believe wholesale every word of the doom mongering, sure.

I personally think this is more in line with Meta’s actual strategy with regards to its interactions with the fediverse.

Really? Much ado about nothing, it seems. Just seems you’re looking for drama.

Don’t like the admins of your instance? Don’t want to use an instance that may federate with Threads? Use a different one/host your own, which it seems you’ve said you’re going to do. That’s the beauty of the fediverse; you’re not behold to any instance owners you don’t wish to be. =)

Hopefully in future this is built in to the software. Ideally you’d be able to download a JSON/XML file from your settings page for your settings/subscribed communities then upload them to a different instance similar to how it works with Piped instances, for example.