I think that’s only a problem if your intent is to become the best player in the world. I just play chess for fun and I don’t really care much if I lose. I don’t care about memorising standard openings.
I’m not very good, but if I wanted to memorise a billion different things, I’d study a language or something. Playing online allows me to play with people who are just about as bad as I am when I have a few minutes to spare.
The people running the servers. Check your local instance details to see who runs the server. And yes, they can shut down at any time, so consider donating to help with the server costs if you’re a heavy user.
Lemmy: not really. Fediverse: kinda, yeah. Threads is the biggest, followed probably by WordPress and Flipboard. Tumblr is also working on joining the Fediverse. None of those companies will likely ever work with Lemmy/Kbin, though. There are also a few small companies that you can pay to set up a Mastodon server for you.