Does the majority need to be part of it? Since day one the web was always built by the oddball minorities. It's easy to forget how weird it was considered to spend any amount of time online in the pre-smartphone era.
Now, maybe it's mainly a hacker news problem, because you can find people out there who just build something without thinking to much about monetization and it seems many of them consciously avoid this site.
But the willingness to be an active part in making something better seems to have dwindled and people project a powerlessness to change the status quo, when indeed it was in the past always the technical people who were forerunners with this kind of stuff (and consequently are also at least partly to blame for the things we have now). But these days, you can't even convince many techies to stop using chrome, even if they admit to hating it.
I wonder how we get that back? How we can convince techies, that not only can they do it, but when they build it, they will come? Because they always do!
I think it's easier to convince someone they're wrong by showing than telling. This is fairly central to what I'm trying to do with my search engine project. Build something so profoundly contradictory to expectations about what is possible to make sticking to those notions completely untenable.
I think the SerenityOS gang does a fantastic job at this too, much better than I do arguably.
(Just thoughts. Not based on anything other my opinions)
Have you checked out the Gemini protocol for example? It's a weird space for weird people, in the best way.