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What's stopping someone from literally cloning the minimal feature-set we loved, and so many people here seem to be pining for?

I scrolled down a fair bit and didn't see anyone posting an alternative.

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Spam and abuse. That is, assuming you get critical mass to begin with, but as soon as people find out another service where they can upload files to and the like, the abuse will begin. Facebook employs (tens of?) thousands of people for content moderation, and that's after their well-trained automated systems filter out the worst / well known stuff.

I don't know how other, newer social media (e.g. bluesky) handle it. I suppose there's off the shelf software / services for something like that?

Network effects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

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