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@TheBreadmonkey I know this is a bit niche and parochial, but from personal experience, I have felt like it's a good comparison: using fedi instead of the big corporate social media is like supporting your local non-league football club.

You're not one of millions of people all talking about the same kind of thing. You don't have a vast audience with which to say celebratory things when it all goes well or sympathetic things when it doesn't.

People don't care about your club. Many don't know it exists. It's not visible, it's not prominent, it's not conveniently accessible through every possible medium. Things go wrong, quite often, and you have to expect that as part of your lot in life. Nothing is ever entirely easy.

But what you get in return from supporting your local non-league club is a community that genuinely cares about you and wants to be your friend. You get a club that sees you as a human being, who are glad you're there, who value your opinion, who want you to be happy. If you're not happy, you won't be alone, and if you protest then you're not easy to ignore. The people running the club are probably just ordinary locals who care and don't mind wasting their time and money.

You don't get exploited as purely a commercial resource. You're not lost and irrelevant among millions of identical customers. You don't have to worry about funding a murderous dictatorship or a monstrous capitalist. When people complain about everything that's wrong with modern football, they don't mean you.

And sometimes, you get a degree of joy that people who attach themselves to Liverpool or Man City etc will never experience: the joy of seeing the little guy achieve way beyond expectations, and actually being part of that.