[ggariepy]

The problem is the network effect IS the game. Without it, you can have a perfectly functional but essentially useless social media application. MeWe comes to mind for me. I thought it would be a perfect Facebook replacement. I thought wrong. With a user community in the mere hundreds of thousands (last I checked) virtually nobody you know is on MeWe, even though technically they have all the bells and whistles Facebook does, and they pledge not to sell your information.

[Schroedingersat]

Another private company is just going to do the same things, pledge or no.

For actually community owned protocols (an example is matrix or fediverse), someone has to go first. May as well be you.

Make an account, ask a community group to be contactable without signing over your private info, get a couple of friends to do the same.