I was coming here to say that! It’s possibly apocryphal, but the way I heard it was that the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign did this when they did their main quad (I still remember them telling me this when I got a tour before applying there 30 years ago). And they didn’t just look for where the plants were dead, but they also looked for broadleaf weeds, which sustain trampling better than grasses (it’s a land grant university in the midwest. Of course there’s an agriculture angle).
Time or technical challenge are not the issue. The issue is that the utility of a social network is a function of the number of individuals in that network.
That’s why Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit all still have dominant positions in their regimes. If you want to see what your friends are saying you need to be on the same network they are on. And if they are on Twitter, signing up for Bluesky doesn’t magically get you their content. I’m off twitter, never really used insta, I have my FB account, but I only log in now when I need to check on specific things (like seeing if people were OK after the wildfires swept through the town I used to live in), and I guiltily admit I still use reddit, largely because a lot of the niche subs I frequent aren’t here. I know the solution to that last problem is for someone like me to step up and make them, but… I’m tired boss. I can either be a volunteer firefighter, or I can admin a firefighter com on Lemmy. I can’t do both.