[hm10]

> How do we get 2.5 billion people to move when none has moved already — chicken-and-the-egg problem of “but all my friends...”

By migrating 'groups' over to the new platform, rather than targeting individuals to migrate. Make it easier for your most popular groups or communities on the existing platform to move over to the new network (ex. by sharing a join link in the existing group * ) effectively bringing over the 'network effect' to the new network, rather than relying on individual users to switch one by one.

* Existing platforms might not play well this strategy. I've heard of FB blocking group messages which contain invites to join rival platforms.

[K0SM0S]

Great idea, groups: yes, totally. Easier said than done but that's definitely a great boulevard.

You touch a critical point too. I've pondered the matter of "how to make the other side(s) do what you want?" in many fields, from sales to politics passing by business or education. Here's my observation: the ideal way to win is when the other side wins as well.

You have to make it so there's something in it for them and something in it for you; and doing this immensely reduces the friction of the whole transition —and said friction is always paid, either by money we don't have or that they will spend to block us, or by users in UX and frustration; both risk the whole success.

It's exactly the same for the "99% versus 1%" situations: no common ground means no solution, but you have to think out of the box. Example for economics: less inequalities in a country tend to produce longer life expectancy even for the highest 1% — because better nurses, better emergency workers, better infrastructures e.g. roads, better construction for hospital norms, etc. Same thing with education for their children, all the services we share at a 'collective enough' level. That's an example of a win-win argument that should be used by those in the 99%, and are definitely put forward by advocates within the 1%.

I think you don't win against Facebook, or Google or Amazon and Apple. You win by incentivizing them to join the movement, because we all together work to make overall better for everyone. We massively grow the pie, so that even less shares means more of what each party wants —profit for some, freedom for others, security for all, etc.

It's the only sustainable way to 'win' imho, free of retaliation fears or cyclic trends, you just 'clean' the problem once and for all with a self-sustainable solution. You win survival not against pre-existing tensions but with co-dependency / harmony, even parasitism, finding the ways to co-exist and both thrive.

[dogcomplex]

Hey! I might have already said most of what I need to in my other comment, but I'd like to get into your idea of how these big companies might be incentivized to cooperate and drop their garden walls. e.g. Facebook (/Instagram) - what do you think could possibly be done to positively incentivize them to open their data up to other platforms? They make so much from selling people's usage data every day to advertisers, and their relevance seems to be dependent on cumulative network effects (people sticking with them because all their friends are on it) rather than actual unreplicable innovation (their tech could be easily copied) or reputation (people kinda hate them now!). Why would Facebook loosen their stranglehold on user data, open their API, or allow people to easily leave en-masse willingly? It seems to me that the incentives for these big companies to lock people into their platforms far outweigh their potential benefits from sharing with other platforms. Utility/usefulness/beauty are cheap and worthless - anyone can create or copy something useful or pretty. It's network effects that are valuable - and sharing with other platforms (especially open source) means diluting your ownership of them.

I'd argue even that an eternally-growing "pie" is itself a bit of a dated concept. This kinda assumes value is created by greater and greater utility of an economy - whereas with Moore's Law winding down (and the arguments in my other comment) it's possible that value is really just aggregating in scarcity rather than innovation or uplifting of the general population - and so strengthening your ownership is the better play, rather than fostering open communication. (Though ideally you should secretly do the former while publicly appearing to do the latter) Sure, attracting networks of people is still valuable, and you have some minimum quality requirements to do that, but if you can make it as hard as possible for those people to leave without totally breaking those quality requirements - even better.

As I said in the previous thread: way I see it, I think to overcome these walled gardens we need to considerably mature the consumer incentive structures - making masse movement between platforms easier, and with real concrete payoff, to individual users. Only once such threats are actually viable will the big companies cave and aim to improve their user retention through good reputation rather than dirty tech practices forcing retention. The economics do seem to incentivize consumers eventually doing this, though, but they might just be a bit too dumb right now - and companies are taking advantage.