That's a fine reason to use an alternative social network, but building these things doesn't solve the larger problem in a way that is meaningfully competitive.

That's a fine reason to use an alternative social network, but building these things doesn't solve the larger problem in a way that is meaningfully competitive. GNUSocial has been around for ages, but you don't see anyone scrambling to compete against the rising tide of federated social networks. Most people are on Facebook and Twitter. That is our target market. The question isn't, "how do I maintain control of my media?", that's actually not a hard problem. The problem that needs solving is this: How can we, the people, compete directly with enormously wealthy corporate entities? We have them hooked on free software, that's a huge win, but how do we go from there to user acquisition? How do we do support? Marketing? How do we ensure good UX? Does it cost money? How do we pay for our time? I don't pretend to know the answer, but I think these are things the FOSS community needs to spend some time thinking about.