[throwaway3699]

With great time, and care. Discord managed to do this in only 4 years, so it is possible. The cynical side of me says that a distributed social network, by definition, doesn't have the ability to run large marketing campaigns like Discord.

[JohnWhigham]

It's a little different. Discord launched amidst a power vacuum, at least with respect to a chat/community platform for video games. Xfire was the only real one, but it had been on the decline for years. A better analogy would be a decentralized Discord competitor trying to start right now and with the odds it has going up against Discord.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Discord got traction because it was substantially better than Teamspeak, and Skype leaks IPs letting jerks DDoS you. It turning into something of a social network was very unexpected.

[lapetitejort]

Yeah, a better question might be: "How can I convince a VC that there's a buck to be made when the user can just take all their data and leave?"

[throwaway894345]

"Look, many countries are enforcing privacy rights; the ad model isn't sustainable. You should start a social media network with a different model so that you can be the first mover who benefits from network effects when the privacy shoe finally drops".

Something like that, although I don't delude myself into thinking that's coming in the near future unless perhaps Apple makes it part of its new privacy-centric campaign. Even then I'm not sure Apple would do better with respect to free speech and moderation.