ipernity and flickr

I recently started posting over here after the censorship trouble on Flickr.  I have seen this sort of thing several times over the years.  People get upset with a service they are using and sometimes move to another service of the same type.  Although most of the time it seems that people just complain and stay at the same place. 

I have often wondered why instead of moving from place to place on the internet looking for a savior why people don't just get together and take ownership of a service?  If you want a place to share photos why don't people who share that interest set up their own site?  That way the people who have an interest in the site would own the site and not be at the mercy of the goodwill of some company.  Nowadays there is a lot of free software that is not difficult to set up that could be used to make about any kind of site that a group may be interested in, and the costs of webhosting are now fairly reasonable.   And although such a project likely would not have the same kind of immediate gratification that moving to a dependency on another company might have it likely would be more stable in the longrun. 

Maybe I am unrealistic in my thinking here.  I did have one experience with a message board where eventually the members did take ownership.  However that was a very long process even though it only involved a small group of people.  And the problem there was not so much a technical one as it was with one of having the people who said they valued the forum take the actual steps to own the forum.  And it is this lack of willingness to take ownership and responsiblity for services that are valued that I wonder about.  Especially when the choice is between a place where one would have a real voice and a place where one has to rely on someone else being willing to listen to the voice of the users.