As a result, it's not that you can't make your own social platform, it's that your platform lacks critical components for instant gratification.
Maybe I am wrong though. Open to discussion for my perspective.
- First it would have a cost, either in money to pay someone to develop/run the platform or in time/knowledge to tinker with some open-source solution. That shouldn't be a problem as the target market is the group of people who are making a conscious choice to dodge the ad platform. BUT it does severely reduce the network effect, possibly down to the point of becoming an ultra-specialized niche club.
- Then, there's the point you bring up: you'll essentially be trying to sell steamed broccoli inside of a candy store.
Personally, Facebook and such has pretty much poisoned the whole idea of "social media" entirely. My default position these days is that if it's "social media", then I can't trust it.
I don't know how many people share my attitude. It might not be enough to matter.
- User data is held in a trust with independent trustees (like a mutual fund complex) who oversee and set limits on how the platform company uses the data for advertising.
- Users can "withdrawal" their data at any time.
- Instead of micro-targeting individual users advertisements would be sold to groups (like a mutual fund) based on anonymized data from the users who choose to join that group.
- Users could "invest" in a particular group by joining groups that reflect their interests and creating content/posts in those groups. Daily up votes would represent the creators "share" of the advertising proceeds to that group (like dividends) so good content is rewarded.
- Development/maintenance would be paid by a flat % of advertising revenue taken off the top before the "profits" are distributed to "shareholders."