I've always the held the somewhat cynical position that this sort of stuff would push [the interesting] people towards other, decentralized Internets. I'm a big fan of new projects like IPFS and DAT, and GNUnet had a great call to arms on their about page (which seems to have been moderated a little) [1] saying very similar things to the article. Maybe the internet of things will save us after all, by finally providing the vast, dense network of interconnected wireless devices that is needed to provide a robust structure to a really distributed net.
I don't think those people have to leave. We just need to collectively realize that, just like with old media , there is a 'mainstream', people who mostly use the internet (the facebook crowd, who are now the bulk of the web traffic), and the more eclectic crowd who care about the internet (largely, the pre-FB mass of the internet).
These are two distinct crowds. Considering that the FB crowd contains mostly people who did not use the internet before, and don't really know its culture, it's going to take a decade or more until this mass of people is replaced by younger internet-natives. Until then, the net is living in a transitory phase
That's interesting, I like the idea that digital natives will have more of a vested interest in caring about the internet, but I'm not sure if it will play out, especially if there continues to be such a strong focus on things like Instagram and tiktok which are largely disconnected from the net at large.
[1] https://gnunet.org/en/about.html