I do get your point, and in a perfect world that would be the solution. However, there are too many considerations to keep in mind with this:

1.- it’s usually the nerdy crowd that is willing to go out of their way to resist monopolies like this. The rest of the people cannot be bothered with this because they risk missing an Instagram post of a dog scratching a carpet. So, creating a solution geared at nerds is highly likely to achieve the desired effect.

2.- doing something like this is still doing something, which is much more than anyone can expect from “regulators”. Librewolf, Mulkvad browser, Brave, etc, are there because a bunch of nerds did them, nothing was being regulated.

3.- in every post about enshitification I’ve seen the last couple of years the need to regulate these companies always comes up. This has had little to no impact in getting those regulations even started.

Those are only 3 of the many reasons why we do need more of these independent and nerd focused applications. If we didn’t have them, then we’d be unequivocally fucked.

Lemmy and Mastodon, what was/is being regulated to make them happen instead of fakebook, Quitter and fucking reddit? Nothing at all.

You make a good point, but the chances of anything happening on the regulatory side of things in the near future is basically null. I hope I’m wrong.