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How do you compete with free? Unless you're running a charity, you have to make money somehow eventually. That's there are no mainstream paid competitors to Facebook says (investors believe) theres not a large intersection of users who care about privacy and customers willing to pay a sustainable fee to run such a service. So we're left with Facebook/similar, or hosting open source clones.

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You cannot compete with free, unless their experience is so bad that people are willing to throw money at the problem to have it be better. Most of the time, that isn't the case. 'Facebook that values your privacy' is not a value proposition that most people care to pay money for.

'Photoshop but [cheaper, free-with-ads, without an Adobe subscription]' is an area where people have successfully built businesses, however.

The problem is that we are making life harder and harder for people to do things for free, due to the privatization of everything. With more commons, people are more likely to create high-quality things for free.

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