I thought about this question a lot, and it seems that there are a lot of practical hurdles:
- Financing & monetization: it takes a lot of time and resource to build a scalable social network, and somehow that needs to be financed and become financially viable. People are used to social networks being free, so it's hard to convince them t…
I thought about this question a lot, and it seems that there are a lot of practical hurdles:
- Financing & monetization: it takes a lot of time and resource to build a scalable social network, and somehow that needs to be financed and become financially viable. People are used to social networks being free, so it's hard to convince them to pay. If you introduce ads, you introduce a conflict of interest.
- Competition & risk: It needs a really good USP to stand out in the crowd and convince people to sign up. You have the chicken-and-egg problem with users vs. a feature-rich platform. Lastly, anything you build that gets successful and is compatible with prevalent networks could be copied by big tech.
- Market entry barriers & network effects: with so many platforms, apps and service consuming our attention it needs some very good reasons to convince users to sign up to a new platform. I did take a look at a lot of promising alternative social networks but many of them seem to die before they reach critical mass because they couldn't build atomic networks and utilize network effects to their advantage.
If you want to see some (rather unknown) different takes on social platforms, you can check out:
I thought about this question a lot, and it seems that there are a lot of practical hurdles:
- Financing & monetization: it takes a lot of time and resource to build a scalable social network, and somehow that needs to be financed and become financially viable. People are used to social networks being free, so it's hard to convince them to pay. If you introduce ads, you introduce a conflict of interest.
- Competition & risk: It needs a really good USP to stand out in the crowd and convince people to sign up. You have the chicken-and-egg problem with users vs. a feature-rich platform. Lastly, anything you build that gets successful and is compatible with prevalent networks could be copied by big tech.
- Market entry barriers & network effects: with so many platforms, apps and service consuming our attention it needs some very good reasons to convince users to sign up to a new platform. I did take a look at a lot of promising alternative social networks but many of them seem to die before they reach critical mass because they couldn't build atomic networks and utilize network effects to their advantage.
If you want to see some (rather unknown) different takes on social platforms, you can check out:
vero.co, bsky.social, diaspora.social, cohost.org, mewe.com, marcopolo.me, counter.social