Alternative social media is discovering what hard problems centralized media has cracked. Problems we don't even see or know about, things we take for granted.

Alternative social media is discovering what hard problems centralized media has cracked. Problems we don't even see or know about, things we take for granted. Things not appreciated because we almost exclusively pay negative attention to social media, for understandable reasons. Storage, as an example. It balloons. With video even more. Ever growing costs not necessarily on par with income. Hate FB as much as you like, but my photo posted 16 years ago is still there. Depending on the software, social media can be compute intense. Not cheap. Compliance. The legal headache of complying with every jurisdiction And of course the worst: moderation. Deleting clearly illegal content, gore, scammers, spammers, impersonators followed by the large gray zone realm of the culture wars. A 24/7 operation that you can't ever walk away from and hollows you out over time. All of that for what? A little carved out box for "your" people? Just open a normal forum, Reddit, Discord and piggy back on another platform. You're carrying a disproportional burden for questionable benefits. You're never going to rebuild social media at scale from scratch. You're effectively creating a small chat group for like-minded individuals. Mastodon is the biggest attempt at alternative social media. It's 8 years old and has 800K MAU and that MAU is perpetually tanking. It carved out a little corner for misfits. Good for them, but the entire "fediverse" is unlikely to account for more than that.