A lot of technically sound solutions in this space simply lack the addictive quality to draw in the crowds. Instagram and similarly popular networks, for all their flaws, are designed from the ground up to exploit human nature. If you sit on any form of public transport, you can see this in action. People obsessively checking whatever networks they are on.

Anything lacking that addictive quality is not going to come close to disrupting the established players. That takes more than people geeking out over protocols or raging against ads and powerlessly waving their fists at the big FANG bullies.

Money for example. It takes a lot of cash to get anything decent off the ground. People working on some low level protocols in their spare time doesn't get the job done. Whenever money is involved, power follows. And people with power will raise barriers to protect and nurture that power. That's how walled gardens are created.

The counter move here is to get organized with a foundation and make sure that gets funded properly. That has worked extremely well for a range of OSS projects. The Linux Foundation, the Apache Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, WikiMedia, etc. The list is quite long. But fundamentally any time investor cash gets involved, walled gardens are a foregone conclusion.

>A lot of technically sound solutions in this space simply lack the addictive quality to draw in the crowds. Instagram and similarly popular networks, for all their flaws, are designed from the ground up to exploit human nature. If you sit on any form of public transport, you can see this in action. People obsessively checking whatever networks they are on.

I think the main reason why they're hard to beat is the first mover advantage of becoming the first popular networks of their kind.

This advantage creates multi-sided markets. There are strong incentives for businesses to build on top of those platforms enabled by reaching a critical mass of users, this advantage is converting networks into a self promotional flywheels pulling in more and more users.

It gets addictive because businesses usually know their audience and journey they're on and create content incentivizing them to take the next step in that journey.

Of course it's addicitve for users if you can anticipate their next step, and for businesses if they have all those micro targeting options just a click away. The easy way wins.

Fortunately, the whole point of the plan is to improve on social media without needing cooperation from google and friends--the "pragmatic decentralized web," if you will.

Given political will, that is a solvable problem. We could require any platform that benefits from the network effect (and crosses a certain usage threshold) to become federated, based on an open protocol.

This would destroy most of the financial value in Meta though.

With gigabit internet to the house and IPv6 becoming rapidly prolific in the US you don’t need them. You only need the proper application.

So did standard oil. And AT&T. It is matter of political will mostly