I hear you. That network effect is insidious.

I really like tinkering with trying to make things a community would use. I have my home server, and I just set up a Luanti / Minetest server, and I want to dabble in MeshTastic, and get people to use Matrix and Signal instead of Discord.

…and then I just think nobody will bother anyway, so… :(

Sadly the bigtech powers have overcome the required “friction” of consideration and discernment when it comes to choosing how one communicates.