[ThrustVectoring]

Building a better product isn't the issue, it's convincing people to use it. The entire value proposition of using Facebook is that a lot of people use Facebook.

You kill Facebook by ceasing your use of Facebook, if you can without too horrible consequences.

[galdosdi]

To solve this chicken and egg problem, you could build a social network that interoperates with Facebook -- use a combination of public (and undocumented browser to server) APIs to proxy communications back and forth. Then anyone who wants to use Competitorbook can still talk to people on Facebook through it, allowing competing social networks to naturally grow without network effect problems.

This would threaten FB and immediately lead to an API blocking arms race, to be followed by a legal challenge. If you're well funded and win the legal challenge (which hey, IANAL at all, but the comparison between FB today and Bell in its time is not crazy) you win.

[toomuchtodo]

What if it piggybacked off of Signal instead?

After the Cambridge Analytica fiasco, I’ve told all of my Facebook Messenger contacts that I’ll only chat on Signal from now on. With Signal providing identity management (and backed by a foundation with $50 million in the bank), that might reduce the bootstrapping necessary.

Start with profiles, then groups, then events, and grow from there.

[Alex3917]

> Building a better product isn't the issue, it's convincing people to use it.

Calacanis should just fund one of the 100+ alternatives that already exist, but don't yet have a critical mass of users. Funding someone to write new software for something that not only could, but should be bootstrapped is unlikely to produce anything viable.

[dane-pgp]

Or fund lobbying of (probably EU) politicians to write a law forcing Facebook to interoperate with the 100+ alternatives that already exist, using OAuth / OpenID Connect and W3C social networking standards.

Once people can have all the benefit of Facebook (i.e. mutual visibility with Facebook users) without having their data stored on Facebook's servers, or their experience controlled by Facebook's UI, then Facebook will quickly diminish in relevance.

[mvid]

Won’t this work the opposite way as well? Facebook will be free to ingest all of the data from the smaller social networks

[dane-pgp]

They're already free to do this in theory with social network sites that don't require logins to see people's data (i.e. Twitter clones), but hopefully the EU's GDPR would make it easy to bring a case against Facebook if they were using the ingested data for any purpose other than supporting their own users.

The competing social network would probably need to have a privacy policy saying that other sites can ingest their data only if the remote user's "friend request" is accepted by the local user, and the data can only be ingested for a set of prescribed purposes.