I have seen others explain it like email. Email accounts will still exist regardless of if, say, Gmail shuts down. Same with fediverse instances. Unlike traditional social medias like Facebook and Twitter, people can talk to people on other sites. Imagine if people on Twitter and Facebook could reply to each other
Looks like it can be self-hosted. You should be able to install Docker and run it with the docker run command it shows (then go to localhost:8080). Here’s a link to it on GitHub: https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym