It's generally easier for the layperson to pay a gym membership than it is to have the upfront cost of a barbell set and coordinating a schedule with their neighbor who owns a treadmill.

I don't want to sound too pro-corporate, I just don't want to fault others when they fall for the veneer of a "cohesive product." It takes a lot of work to organize a community project and why it's so special when they do come together.

The fact that people are so lazy that they keep going for the corporate-sure-to-enshittify options shows how little people actually care about escaping corporate control of their lives.

It's not that deep.

People want to go where other people are. A tiny minority of them are even aware of the things that are influencing your decisions. Not a single moment is spent thinking about whether X or Y is more 'corporately controlled' before deciding to join a new platform.

Mastodon is confusing as shit though. They could have made is not as confusing, but this is what happens when you get backend only developers designing the front end of a product.

Ugh, Google+ was so much better than Facebook. The whole circles concept was a game changer for social media that no one else has really adopted in a meaningful way. Half the reason millennials began to leave Facebook was not wanting their parents seeing what they're posting, so being able to decide which group can see a particular post was an awesome idea.

Sadly it just never got the adoption