ATP & IndieWeb Criticism: "People don't care about owning their data."

It is definitely true that the average person's eyes are going to glaze over if you make your pitch: "Oh you've gotta try this new social media network, it lets you own your data!" That will never work, or it will only work as well as Mastodon works, which I am less cynical about that the average Bluesky poster to be clear but Mastodon is never going to reach (and does not want to achieve) the mainstream.¹

But I think people actually do care when they are using a service and discover that there is no way to get their posts or data out of it.

Yes, it is true that they don't care until the very moment they find themselves wanting or needing to do that. But then it strikes this poster as pretty unfair, and annoying, and hey why can even they do that, those are my pictures!

I think this means people do care about owning their own data; just they wouldn't word it like that, and you might not be able to directly appeal to this concern. Just like how, left to their own devices, the average person probably wouldn't buy car insurance until it was too late, but the majority of drivers do actually enjoy the benefits of having it whether they consciously know that or not.

I am not sure where that leaves advocates of alternate social media networks like Bluesky though. Obviously trying to make the "own your own data" argument explicitly is not gonna work, and even trying to make it implicitly sometimes upsets people for reasons I, as a tech-enjoying person, honestly cannot really relate to. ("I can use another app view? What are you talking about?? Is this Mastodon shit?!?!? Mods????????")

But as an example my brother uses no social media, and is a smart guy but has no personal interest in his computer at all outside of it being a video game console and no interest in the Internet except as a medium for playing those video games, spent years bemoaning being unable to delete his Instagram account he hadn't touched in years because he couldn't figure out how to get several precious pictures of his kid out of it; it certainly feels like he does care about data portability, a phrase he'd never use and likely does not know.

I wonder if there were a bit more AT Proto apps talking to each other (this kind of thing does seem to be under development!) people might find it more fun to jump between applications.

If you made it fun, and didn't talk about the insurance aspects, well they could "enjoy" the insurance-like aspects when they need them in the same way you "enjoy" getting a check for your totaled car, but thanks to the actual fun of watching some vertical videos with their microblogging friends they will have signed up for the insurance anyway.

To be clear this is all rambling, I am very far from any kind of developer and have no solutions.²