I think part of the issue with Ello was that they sell themselves as non-corporative social media while maintaining two of the most important characteristics of corporative social media:
Centralisation and lack of federation
Being closed-source
The story would have gone completely different if they
Had made it open-source allowing users to contribute to the project, both as devs and through donations.
Added decentralisation and federation, allowing others to make their own Ello servers. This could have taken a lot of weight (financial and otherwise) from the developers/founders. Users cost money. Dividing the user base within different servers, pay by and moderated by different people means dividing the costs.
There is no solution for that beyond properly setting user expectations. Users may want to understand that anything published on the internet should be assumed to be a permanent record. Anybody that can access a post on any website has the ability to copy and re-post it on another website such as an internet archive.
