To all the people poking fun at "thousands"... You have to start somewhere, and I'm sure you'd be tickled pink to see thousands of new users signing up for your app...
You need network effects for social network rivals to take off. That isn’t to say there won’t be a Facebook successor (there almost certainly will be one — the big challenge for Facebook is if it has a piece of that or not), but just as Diaspora, Google+, Peach, Ello, App.net, Gab, Mastadon, and any other number of attempts at this have failed (calling Mastadon a failure is unfair, but its not Twitter and won’t ever be), so will this.
Snap was a threat to Facebook’s core messaging properties (WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram), so Instagram had to blatantly copy Snap to win back momentum. Snap is still a thing, but unless it leans into the fact that it isn’t owned by Facebook (which is ultimately what hurts WA and Instagram), it isn’t ever going to catch-up, especially on a global level. TikTok has the sort of network effect Vine never had, and could be a real contender for the next generation, even with its ownership questions. Twitch and YouTube still have opportunities for growth — and there is still lots of room for innovation in the live video space.
And look, maybe this will be a really nice niche community for a small group of people. I hope it is. I hope the people that signup and pay for it enjoy it. I hope Wales doesn’t get bored when it doesn’t have tons of users and make tons of money.
There is a market for small community social networks. Not everything has to be the scale of Facebook — I’d argue it’s better when things aren’t that size — but let’s not pretend we’re not talking about this because it’s being positioned as something that is “taking on” the giant — when it would be more helpful - but make for a poorer headline/narrative - to say, “rich dude wants to recreate The Well for a generation of users who doesn’t know what The Well was.”
At least, that is what I would be looking at doing. Certainly the monthly fee is high, so what level they break even in running costs will be lower and may well be that they already break even in running and depreciation of assets -costs. May even be a small monthly profit already. We just don't know.
It reminds me of a network that was created for the extreme rich, a few years ago. On searching for it, I find that there have been several such created: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/09/social-networks-for-... That was written in 2014, so perhaps there are more since then.
Who says that success should be measured by Twitter? It may be that no other social network approaches Twitter and Facebook in size given their dominance, but that doesn't mean that there can be no other social networks.
In my opinion, one-size-fits-all social was a mistake to begin with. Smaller niche spaces (like HN) are much more interesting.
To think of it another way: did your favorite local bistro "fail" as a restaurant because it didn't become as large as McDonald's? Which one would you rather eat at?
Big social media companies are now seen as responsible for the destruction and compromise of democracy and have many more problems which wouldn't exist if they weren't so universally adopted.
I hope the future is full of many smaller niche social media sites that cater to a smaller group instead of trying to appeal to everyone.
I personally don't have any major social media accounts, just small ones like HN - but I understand why people feel the need to use larger ones.
What matters is the people I want to interact with, and in Seattle they are on Mastodon. Not everyone needs to be on it, and frankly if close to everyone were on it you'd potentially drive away a good subset of users. That being said, by design I can retain my feed of friends on Mastodon without fear of some corporation or eternal spring of new users wrecking it.
I too was 'logged off except' a wealth of university-related groups. Then I was 'logged off during' writing up my dissertation, and finally just 'logged off'.
(And now I'm still contributing to user count, while continually thinking I should just log in to delete my account, as I've heard a couple of times from people that thought I was 'on Facebook' or 'what happened to your profile' and maybe more people that think I'm just ignoring them than I'm aware of.)
I'm not a big Facebook user, but my parents have been caught up in the bush fires currently raging in Australia and got cut off from power and internet (no power for satellite internet, and the mobile mast ran out of backup power), and finding a local Facebook group created to discuss the fires was fantastically helpful, I got in touch with their rural route mailman and people in the local village and found a bunch of good local news sources.
In comparison there was nearly nothing on Twitter (one Sydney reporter who was tweeting from her dispatch for two or three days). Main-stream news sites were utterly useless with no detail in their reports. Without Facebook I would have had drastically less information and more worry.
There was a clear, forum-inherited structure to most groups. It kept me coming back, day after day.
Google+ had a similar appeal - I dont know you, I dont care. I like what you have to offer, so I'm getting to know you.
Bridging that into meatspace relationships by frontloading them first? Was straining - I realized how little my peers cared for what they even do. Flooding that feed with game-spam? Negated the premise. And turning it into infinite-scroll of bad takes to drive engagement just turned me temporarily, but deeply misanthropic.
Turning online into afk relationships and friendships made all of this worthwhile. Facebook had that for a bit with their "events" features... But those got nerfed into being useless without an advertising firm's budget.
I, for one? Am happy to join somewhere that respects my time.
That's literally why I added the caveat of saying "Mastodon isn't a failure" -- but it hasn't overcome the incumbent and it won't and that may not have been the goal, but that is certainly the story that was told/sold "this OSS de-centralized app is going to replace Twitter," if not by the founders, than by the press/people excited by the idea.
The differentiator behind Mastodon is federation via the ActivityPub protocol. And Mastodon is just one implementation of ActivityPub. More are being built every day.
It's likely that a world with ubiquitous ActivityPub would look very different from the social media landscape of today -- Mastodon is a little like Twitter, Pixelfed is a little like Instagram, Peertube is a little like Youtube, but they all syndicate their content to each other. So as ActivityPub grows the conventional categories blur. What happens if WordPress decides to add ActivityPub support to the Core?
I can't read the future but I think the real metric to look at is ActivityPub adoption. No one is tracking it very well right now to my knowledge. And if it hits a certain critical mass I think it will start to reconfigure the current categories of social media. It will also bring down barriers to entry which may discourage the rise of incumbents similar to today's crop.
My main gripe with it is that potentially writing a spec-compliant server in an enterprise-y language like Java almost feels like a fool's errand (I tried it in Dart, which is very Java-esque).
On that note, I don't even think that the main focus should be on which protocol is used, but rather the features of platforms in the "fediverse," and reasons other than the blanket term "privacy" that the average person would consider switching.
Like I said, I'm a fan of ActivityPub and its concept, but I think it's fair to say that spec is more complex than what it needs to be, and would have been better off strictly defining the shape of data it can handle.
Are we talking about that? I don't think so... why must everyone "overcome" the incumbent?
Sure, Facebook is the goto for "general purpose" social networking between friends and family. On the other hand, Facebook is terrible for following and discussing the news, unless you like a huge heap of bias and low-quality clickbait. WT Social is planning to address that niche. Facebook is also terrible if you want to keep up with a huge volume of tech news and follow interesting discussions on those topics with lots of expert contributors. HN fills that niche, but sometimes there is too much politics here, so Lobste.rs exists for people who prefer smaller, more focused conversation.
The "long tail" in the social space is huge. Not every venture needs or wants to be the next Amazon in its space.
> if not by the founders, than by the press/people excited by the idea.
And that's the problem. The press doesn't know what they are talking about.
It’s scale allows niches to spontaneously coalesce and grow stronger over time.
In this case, if all your friends hang out at McDonalds, you're not gonna want to sit at your local bistro alone.
It seems unlikely that this particular new network will succeed, but if it provides value to a tight-knit set of users, it can plant roots and grow.
I always thought human experiments online would be huge with combining live video space, experiment ideas, text chat and a reward system.
Likewise Facebook isn't Myspace and never will be. Does this mean Facebook is a failure?
Facebook aims to cover anyone's every need which could come up in a social interaction or how communication could occur. In other words, FB is a communication, an entertainment and a business platform. WT:Social, on the other hand, seems to be an evolution of the WikiTribune diving into the social market world, yet continuing its focus on reporting and fact-based information sharing. This involves work which isn't all too appealing to the general public.
"Wikipedia have launched a social media site, based around sharing news"
It was really strange and I always assumed at the time that Facebook and Google had come to some agreement behind the scenes.
I get ditching things that don't work, but G+ is a great example of something that had plenty of traction in it's early days and, as far as I can see, lost it purely because G didn't seem to care about it.
Then they ditched them all of a sudden, and now we have premium-priced Pixels that fall well short of the competition.
I didn't use it often but I checked on it periodically just to keep up on what was, hopefully, going to be a contender in the social media world. What I saw was almost no change in user facing functionality over the course of it's existence.
There also didn't seem to be any significant attempt at marketing, monetization or collaboration with the community.
Meanwhile there were significant influencers and content producers with large numbers of followers. The dream of any social media company.
I always assumed it folded because they couldn't agree on a path to monetization.
But from the perspective that they actually did care about it (which I read as they devoted significant resources to it even if that didn't translate to anything that was publicly visible)... It starts to sound more like a company that's hit the self hobbling critical mass of size and internal bureaucracy.
What did it look like from the inside?
I worked in research at the time and have never been a heavy social media user, so it didn't really affect me much, but the internal story seems to fit reality more than what you're describing: the change in user facing functionality was progressive integration of Google products (like YouTube)
I don't know why they thought that this kind of bullshit would work on "techies" (the core audience of Google Reader) - that just made them wake up and realize that Google's "Don't be Evil" motto was a sham...
As for Facebook the site, this is less and less true. I have kids cross different age ranges, and Facebook is not a thing at all for any of them or their social groups. And whenever someone wants to organize things via Facebook, there is always a lot of pushback from people who don't/won't use it.
Their other properties, Whatsapp and Instagram, are very popular, but they serve slightly different functions. So either there is a vacuum left from Facebook (the site), or the market has simply shifted and no longer wants a MySpace/Facebook type platform.
I'm sure they have Whatsapp, Instagram, and other apps, but I've never met someone who couldn't at least provide a Facebook profile when asked and then communicate with me on it.
It seems hard to draw on your kids' experiences until they at least enter university or the work force and are actually meeting new people. I never had a Snapchat until a cute woman asked me if I had one. Now I have one ready to go.
Facebook wasn't even available until I entered university, but that's also when the rolodex becomes useful. Not so much in highschool where, even in my massive school, I still wasn't meeting so many people nor had much control over my social life compared to uni.
So I'm wary of people extrapolating from what kids do. People have been saying the death of FB is just around the corner, "just look at what kids use" for years.
Of course, a lot of this also depends where you live, like how Americans will use iMessage while that's basically unheard of in other parts of the world.
If there is no gain or incentive for the famous users or the so called 'influencers', then the 'millions of users' will stay where the famous users are.