I've read all of your comments in my subthread and I agree with everything you've said. Especially this! It was immediately what came to mind but I hit my post count.
This problem of getting people to care about alternatives to Facebook seems to be something you've given a lot of thought as well. Mind if I ask what field you work in?
I work at Google (with the standard disclaimer that my opinions are my own), with a history in the financial and defense industries. Nothing particularly related to Facebook, but I'm sympathetic to the concerns around Facebook. I just think HN tends to miss the forest for the trees when discussing alternatives
Understandably so, after all HN is its own little echo chamber. Technophobia is a real problem and we can't just tell people to "get over it" and join the rest of us, who have likely spent our entire lives working with computers for hours a day.
And asking someone to rely on their geek friend for deployment, education and support instead of relying on a stable platform like Facebook is just silly. Unless we can provide a similar, stable and feature-packed platform then there is just no perceptible incentive for people to make the switch.
I mean heck, Google couldn't even do it.
I think the problem needs to be attacked from multiple vectors. Simply building a technologically superior platform with better privacy control isn't enough. There needs to be a real shift in understanding about the dangers of big social media.
You've enlarged the scope of my comment tenfold, it was that you could ask a friend to help register a domain or move it, that might happen once or twice a decade.
But what about teaching them proper security practices, deployment practices, maintenance, all of those things that go into actually running a website? Even if its just using Wordpress or a static site generator? Registering a domain is the tip of the iceberg in hosting your own content.