When aunt Martha and uncle Martin weren't using the free and open system, but also weren't using computers to talk to people regularly, the social pressure, if you wanted to stay in touch with them, was toward more physical means: in-person visits, mail, and telephones, which, while definitely technological in nature, have more physicality than the currently-dominant digital world.

People have more of an instinctive understanding of what “open” means in terms of the physical world. You don't meet them at Facebook Square, where every word you say to them goes through corporate-controlled smart air; you might meet them at their house, or at some public or commercial place, and when you're in public, you're both being continously reminded of this through physical environmental cues. The mail is often a monopoly, but its function is circumscribed, and opening your envelopes without a really good reason is at least a clear violation of social norms; the physical object provides a boundary. Telephones don't usually manipulate the context of what you say during calls, and while the mass surveillance issue is hazier there, the basic model of social expectation is still simple. (The simplicity of model applies to a lesser extent to IM, but telephones currently have universal interop in a way that got shattered for e.g. XMPP by a whole storm of issues, and the subscription funding model for the infrastructure has social acceptance that it doesn't in the IM world. I don't have a short history of why this is right now.)

Nowadays, it's likely that the social pressure is for you to actively use the closed system, because that's what your aunt and uncle have reoriented their habits toward after finding that it felt so much more convenient and took so much pressure off them. Which is arguably one of the good effects—though other people have written uneasily about how this is in a way the outsourcing of emotional labor to machines. But because digital social networking is intermediated so much more deeply than earlier and simpler forms of telecommunication, whoever controls the software now has hard influence over the form those habits take, and your aunt and uncle's need to not have a big chunk of their social life disrupted, combined with the relative non-manipulability of the digital world to people who don't fall into the “programmers with a lot of free time who are willing and able to flout TOSes and/or evade detection” class, means they can't easily resist it. The resultant inertia is very asymmetrical in a way that I don't think it was for previous means of socialization. It's also fast in a way that it wasn't before: governments can crack down on things in oppressive ways or manipulate and infiltrate people's social networks, but it's harder to do en masse, and the actions in question have to be more visible to have an effect, so grassroots opposition has more margin to get started. Nowadays, I see people saying that they feel like planning their activism on Facebook is the only way to get any reach.

Then you get how a lot of people's working understanding of computer technology is based on a fuzzy notion of “computers” and “the Internet” which mushes everything together, so whatever decides which models of interaction are fashionable can force you to follow them or be in the dreaded “inaccessible to users because of lack of familiarity” weak position, which just gets reduced to “not easy to use”, and then you die. Compare how Mastodon is basically a Twitter clone on many levels, and that's seemingly what wound up taking off among less distinctly-in-the-know users in the ActivityPub sphere, and even then merely introducing the idea of “instances” seems to have taken a lot of social doing.

So I think we are in a worse position than we used to be, both because getting traction on “move from physical world to open, benevolent digital” is harder than “move from closed, manipulative digital to open, benevolent digital” and because the closed, manipulative digital now has a lot more ways to close off the terrain before you can get anywhere.

… I seriously need to compose my thoughts on this into something more coherent and well-researched at some point.