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There’s an analogy here with programming languages. It’s super hard for a new language to get popular. It might do some things objectively better, but if that doesn’t impact the majority of its users, it needs more or else it ends up populated by ideologues. An exception can sometimes be found in languages with solid interop/foreign function interfaces. Python gets to build on decades of C libraries easily. Likewise with clojure and the JVM. Or Gmail and a standardized email protocol.

So what’s the analogue for social networks? Tim Berners Lee’s pods? Would it be an app that pulls from and pushes to Twitter/insta/fb in addition to its own servers? That’s how apple’s iMessage has done so well. It falls back to SMS if the other person isn’t an adopter of their system.

New systems that can take advantage of existing network effects seem so much more likely to gain popularity. And we really need more of the open interop with social media.