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Comment by Taek | Hacker News Reader

What bothers me the most is how difficult it is to compete with the incumbents. We all want something better. We all have ideas of what better looks like. We've all (or many of us anyway) have tried alternatives.

But you essentially can't overcome the network effects. There's no way to gradually build a social network when everyone is already on a different one.

We have to change that. Facebook should be required to let other platforms consume content produced by its users. If you do that, you suddenly can cold start a competitor, because switching off of Facebook does not mean giving up talking to your grandmother.

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As far as I understand, the new EU Digital Markets Act [1] will support this - forcing big platforms to allow interoperability.

Awesome for platforms like Matrix [2] which are all about supporting federation and bridges to other services (such as Signal, which is hostile to federation [3]).

[1]: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/03/25/interoperability-without-...

[2]: https://matrix.org

[3]: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

Never heard of that. I don't see facebook not pulling out of a market requiring it to share posts and such, especially in private groups and whatnot. Seems like users won't like their posts going wider than facebook either.

Facebook can't afford to pull out of the EU, it's a massive market, and IMHO the cat will be out of the bag and other jurisdictions will follow suit with similar regulations anyways.

There was a big discussion about that here too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30799567

Technically Signal wouldn't be covered under the DMA ( they aren't even close to being big enough). But yep, that's the point of the new regulation and it's awesome. Forces interoperability and levels the playing field between the huge incumbents with moats and competitors. Oh and it will force Apple to allow third party app stores, so there's that too.

The rise of TikTok is a recent example of how this isn't necessarily true. Prior to that, Snap Chat, Instagram, Discord, and even Facebook itself are all examples of disruptive new social networks that quickly surpassed existing incumbents.

Yep, and none of these use open protocols like Matrix, XMPP, or ActivityPub. Makes you wonder if these technologies will always just remain popular with niche communities.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I do think it's possible that an open protocol like ActivityPub can take off with the masses. I think the real issue is that apps like Mastodon offer an experience that is mostly just a copycat of Twitter, so there is no real killer reason for existing Twitter users to hop on over. Same goes for Pixelfed, Pleroma, Element, etc.

I don't think its that simple. The fact that you can name most all of them in a few words is evidence enough that its like striking lightning.

And, with the exception of Facebook, all of them represent completely new ideas rather than incremental changes. If you want to play in the social media game, you need something revolutionary and completely different, not just an incremental or even 10x improvement over what's already there.

And I don't really count MySpace, that was before tech mastered the art of the monopoly.

There's a great deal more that I didn't state because I wasn't making an exhaustive list; you could do worse than by starting by looking at wikipedia[0].

I'm not sure why new ideas are a problem here, but I'd also argue that everything I listed had clear forebearers from which their designs developed from.

MySpace and the Microsoft Antitrust case were in the same era; and there were monopolistic companies before then, in tech.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_serv...

I built up a network on Mastodon and I'm not overly social, and did it from scratch. I'd never used a microblogging service before and even I didn't find it difficult or time-consuming. I enjoy a varied and diverse home feed which is busy enough to find something of interest every day, and that's without looking out into the instance or the rest of the federated servers.

Let fcbook and twitter rot. Not everyone is on them and not all of their users are exclusive to their seeping platforms.

>But you essentially can't overcome the network effects. There's no way to gradually build a social network when everyone is already on a different one.

How did Facebook overtake Myspace then?

I'm not really convinced that the thing holding back Mastodon and other efforts like it is merely incumbency inertia. I think even if you started from zero again, Twitter would take off and Mastodon wouldn't. The Mastodon experience does not strike me as better than the Twitter experience for most users. Most people don't really care if if something is open-source or federated/decentralized. Those are not features that draw users.

> But you essentially can't overcome the network effects.

If the fediverse manages to stay on an interoperability open standards track, then I am sure it can and in a way that dominant platforms find hard to compete against, because their moat disappears in such environment. One where you can only compete on quality and not on lock-in and FOMO. But such open standards are very hard to bring to maturity in healthy ways.

This is exactly the problem we all always have with trying new services and dealing with relatives, friends, coworkers, and new networking pales which is ultimately the daily communication targets.

>What bothers me the most is how difficult it is to compete with the incumbents. We all want something better. We all have ideas of what better looks like. We've all (or many of us anyway) have tried alternatives.

Parler got shut down because it's a public safety threat and did the january 6 insurrection. Except later we find out it wasnt an insurrection and none of the organizing happened on parler. They don't need real justification to shut you down. Free speech is government, not several giant tech corps colluding at the same time. Right? Right?

>But you essentially can't overcome the network effects. There's no way to gradually build a social network when everyone is already on a different one.

Oh for sure you can. Parler got a huge bump but fox news and others. It became #1 app for weeks and then they got shutdown and removed. It was on its way to becoming a serious competitor. It was well past the leud hump. Commies, fishing, all the stuff was on there.

Mind you to shut them down, Google, Apple, and Amazon cannot legally talk to each other. Multiple anti-trust laws prevent them from working together. There is only 1 way for those 3 to act in sync like they did.

This is the US government coming in, ordering them to remove Parler. It's the US government censoring speech.

>We have to change that. Facebook should be required to let other platforms consume content produced by its users. If you do that, you suddenly can cold start a competitor, because switching off of Facebook does not mean giving up talking to your grandmother.

You're missing the forest through the trees. Building a new competitor is simple. Getting it big enough to self-sustain isn't a problem neither.

The problem is that this is the US government censoring speech. These people have transitioned to fully encrypted platforms. The US government most likely does not have access.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/18/05/01/2035246/amazon-tells...

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/21/10/29/2215227/the-us-gover...

https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/01/12/2126230/telegram-adds...

This has everything to do with government breaking human rights. This is about people realizing what it is doing and now it may have lost its access and is probably pretty worried.

Midterms are about to happen. Hillary Clinton was quite vocal about Trump stealing the election. Trump was quite vocal about Biden stealing the election. Republicans in 49 states also think the election was stolen.

The results of midterms don't matter. Everything will be down to transparency. I very much doubt midterms are going to go down with complete transparency.

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