You've edited your comment since it was originally posted, but as a reminder, this is what I was responding to:
> If those communities and apps already respect their users, then do they need this author? What difference would they make?
Which is a pointedly ridiculous thing to say. No, you were not calling on the author to be more ambitious, this is silly.
---
> b) be more ambitious - building or contributing to yet another 3rd party Mastodon or Matrix client (both?) is just more noise in a crowded space going after a relatively small audience.
Donation of time and effort to make platforms more attractive that you are ethically aligned with is not just "noise in a crowded space".
As if FOSS tooling was a crowded space!! These projects are desperate for volunteers, and lack of developer time and resources is one of the biggest handicaps that these projects often face. It is unquestionably valuable for people to volunteer effort in this direction.
It might not be flashy, it might not give you a giant userbase. But some people have different metrics of success than that, and high-impact activities often aren't flashy. You bring up building new projects as an alternative to donating to existing efforts. Yeah, that sounds very attractive and flashy, but there are a half-dozen FOSS platform alternatives to every proprietary service and we don't actually need more of them. What we need is for people to focus on a couple that already exist and make them as good as possible. It's less sexy, but it matters more.