Personally I think that whole aspect of social media is toxic so I don't care, but others are not going to agree. I'm happy with an enclave where I hear the people I want to hear and am not hit with a bunch of spam and propaganda.
* Generative AI's gift to human intellectual and cultural rebirth will actually be due to its motivating the birth of numerous curated spaces of discourse and interaction, with strict AI content policies. I predict there will be a cambrian explosion of these boutique spaces. And society 2.0 will emerge from this.
Then came the monolithic social networks, and we collectively changed from the weird and wondrous adventure mode into the TV-dinner that is the web nowadays. Neither is perfect, and I'm not sure at all how to have both. But I'm glad the pendulum is swinging a tiny bit back.
I use mastodon at the moment and I get value from it. It was network effects that brought me there - at the same time I wanted to join it, a bunch of people I was following elsewhere also moved there.
A "market" seems to be happy with Mastodon, as evidenced by a non-trivial amount of people using it.