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The question then becomes how can you make a website with all your friend (and by association all their friends) make enough profit to run itself?

by andai3 hours ago|

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You mean, how can my friends and I fundraise my $3 VPS? It's going to be rough, but I think we'll find a way ;)

(If we hit the stretch goal, we can upgrade to a raspberry pi!)

by pixl973 hours ago|

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This is a bit of a silly response on your part. You're not answering the question of WHY people are on FB and not on the little sites like existed 20 years ago before FB. It's called the network effect. You have friends, your friends have friend, those friends have friends. Rather than there being 30 bajillion separate sites representing these friends connections, people go "hey, why not one site with everyone there".

Said little sites may run for a bit and die, and the massive monolith remains, at least until another monolith replaces them.

by andai1 hours ago|

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Well, indulge my silliness for a moment... what if the servers on the internet could talk to each other?

I suspect in just a few more decades, we shall reinvent the 90s and 2000s p2p networks from first principles.

by sosborn3 hours ago|

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Early Facebook was kind of a great mix. It had enough people on it, it was making money, and the advertising was much more reasonable. At the time it really was a place to connect with IRL friends.

by aprilthird20213 hours ago|

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It needs enough revenue to fund its operations. And most people won't pay for such a website, so if you want one place where most people you know are, then...

by bogwog3 hours ago|

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Come on, don't hand wave over the obvious. Think about how much it would actually cost to run a social media website that competes with the big social media on the core product of sharing and communicating with friends. It would be extremely realistic to build something that's both free and sustainable with just regular ads, as was done decades before.

(EDIT: to clarify, I don't mean to build an alternative monopoly, I mean to build alternatives that are big enough to survive as a business, and big enough to be useful; A few million users as opposed to the few billions Facebook and Youtube (allegedly) have)

The reason it's hard to imagine such a thing today is because the tech giants have illegally suppressed competition for so long. If Google or Meta were ordered to break up, and Facebook/Youtube forced to try and survive as standalone businesses, all the weaknesses in their products would manifest as actual market consequences, creating opportunity for competitors to win market share. Anybody with basic coding skills or money to invest would be tripping over themselves to build competing products which actually focus on the things people want or need, because consumers will be able to choose the ones they like.

by hatsunearu3 hours ago|

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I feel like discord is kind of like this used correctly, but with the recent drama and such it feels terrible