[scandox]

I'd like to add one remark to this: everything doesn't have to be huge. We don't have to deal always in millions and billions. Small groups. Even individuals. What they do is meaningful. What we do is not pointless just because it doesn't create some massive impact.

[nine_k]

A large service is a service where your friends, parents, coworkers, etc have a high probability to have already joined, thus making the service instantly more useful for communicating with them. Next thing is that you and they will pull in your other related people, again for ease of communication. This is the "network effect".

For a federated service, like email or phone, this is not a problem: the union of all service providers is the entire service, and more providers can connect. So connecting to any compliant provider is fine, and providers have an incentive to be good, or at least outcompete each other by some metric.

For a siloed and sealed-up service, like Facebook or Twitter, once you and (most of) your social graph is there, there's no way anyone can connect from the outside; to be connected with you, they need to dive into the same silo. The bigger the service grows, the harder it becomes for people outside not to consider joining, because of the pull of the part of their social graph who already joined.

I think that federated services will always exist, as long as unimpeded internet connectivity is allowed. I also think that 1-2 huge walled gardens will also exist, for the same reasons why phishing using dancing kittens videos will continue to exist: many humans are emotion-driven and don't value [insert a list here] when overwhelmed by a positive emotion from something new, cute, and free to use.

[CM30]

This. Not every community has to have a million users to be useful. Lots of people are also members of smaller ones dedicated to certain niches. Like say, a genre of music or a favourite sports team or a video game series or anything else.

Just look at Hacker News for example. It'll never be as big as Facebook, Twitter or Reddit, but it doesn't need to be. It's a good community for the people it's aimed at.

The idea you should only make stuff for as large an audience as possible or to get rich quick is perhaps one of the most depressing aspects of the internet (and world) today.

[amelius]

Except in a winner-takes-all market. (This is not about making money, but still needs a critical mass of users to become successful because of the network effect).

[pnutjam]

Social media is only winner take all because the platforms are closed. If enough people say no thanks, that will change. The social networks might not need any one person, but they need all of us and a significant but small percentage can make a difference.

[keganunderwood]

Why do we bother with signal if that's the case? Competition matters even when it seemingly doesn't because we raise the bar. Look how Viber and telegram stick out like sore thumbs (ignore the pos that is allo) because WhatsApp now has e2ee.