To do what? People want to post, share pictures, share video. The gardens arose to do this more easily than setting it up yourself. There's no driving force to work outside these gardens.
Let's take LiveJournal or MySpace… those services arose out of an interesting time when the metaphor of daily posting on the web was novel to a lot of people. Sharing photos on the web was novel so Flickr was created. During these times, folks are figuring out the design patterns of the web that get crafted in HTML/CSS/JS and now they've all but been standardized and commodified by Meta et al.
Let's take LiveJournal or MySpace… those services arose out of an interesting time when the metaphor of daily posting on the web was novel to a lot of people. Sharing photos on the web was novel so Flickr was created. During these times, folks are figuring out the design patterns of the web that get crafted in HTML/CSS/JS and now they've all but been standardized and commodified by Meta et al.