[dopeboy]

Which begs the question, is there a way to dethrone something like Facebook? Because those network effects are increasingly strong.

Perhaps if the AVP reaches the masses, Apple will layer a social layer there and that will become our new social network.

[AdrenalinMd]

Instagram and WhatsApp could have remained independent, but they were acquired by Facebook.

This suggests that anti-monopoly laws may not be effective.

[PaulHoule]

It's funny.

There have been narrow time and place windows where investors have been willing to bet on social media, roughly the 2005-2010 era in Silicon Valley and the 2017-current period in China.

It's conjectured that one factor is the size of the cultural zone, it is easy for a site to get established in a big country like India and then move to a small country like Belgium, but to go to the other way is thought to be impossible.

There was a time when it seemed the route for a social media startup was to go public, after Facebook went public that window seemed to close and the next business plan became "get bought by Facebook". On one hand, events like this

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/032515/whats...

seem like an orderly way for Facebook to keep ahead of the next big thing, bit I think if they had to do it every year for some new startup they'd start to feel that it is like extortion so I imagine Facebook has used whatever pull they have with VCs to suppress investment in this sort of company in SV. (I wish I had some evidence and/or specifics!) And of course Facebook can't keep buying competitors forever because eventually the antitrust cops will wise up.

I found this article

https://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-twitter-faceboo...

but it strikes me as pretty silly. Since Twitter has shown some weakness the competitors we've seen move in are not scrappy commercial startups but instead Facebook with Threads, Bluesky by the founder of Twitter and Mastodon which is whatever it is but it sure isn't commercial.

[eschneider]

Going from small -> large zone WORKS, and is what Facebook did. (Harvard -> more colleges -> general availability). The thing that makes it work is a sense of exclusivity. Small (can) == cool. And you can capitalize on that a bit.

It's not easy, but it's doable.