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I think you are missing the point, you don't need to get 2.2 bn to migrate to your new platform, just "strongly connected components". This is why for example D

I think you are missing the point, you don't need to get 2.2 bn to migrate to your new platform, just "strongly connected components". This is why for example Discord or Slack can exist even though they have some overlap with Facebooks functionality (mostly messenger and groups). I don't really know what the value of facebook is to most people, I've heard that it has groups for almost everything, but most other features I would guess are easily "unbundled" as Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat are evidence for.

kristianc 9y ago
Facebook's value is in the 2.2bn figure - its value to advertisers is in its identity graph. To displace FB as FB did MySpace, you need some way of replicating that. The value of that identity graph to advertisers (which is how you keep the lights on) works in exponents - if you have 10% of Facebook's graph, you don't have something that is 10% as useful, you have something that is 1% as useful. You can get some of the way by unbundling FB's core feature set and innovating on a particular feature, but your upper limit for that is probably a product that is used by hundreds of millions of people, not a Facebook killer. Slack's moat is that it is socially unacceptable to use Facebook at work, which is a nice one to have but sets up an entirely new set of challenges trying to get people to adopt it outside. Discord, similarly is almost entirely limited to gaming. Number of PC Gamers worldwide total tops out at about 800m. WeChat is a special case: Owned by Tencent, operates in a market that Facebook is completely locked out of, and operating on a completely different set of cultural assumptions.