By your logic facebook shouldn't be popular since it was too difficult to start. The thing is, you absolutely 100% don't need a competitor to spring forth full

By your logic facebook shouldn't be popular since it was too difficult to start. The thing is, you absolutely 100% don't need a competitor to spring forth fully formed with 2.2 billion active users on day 1 as Athena leaping out of the head of Zeus. You just need enough of a community to exist for it to be viable on its own (and there are already many not-facebook killers who are at that level). What's missing right now is a compelling experience that fully competes with facebook. Everything else out there is either in a smaller niche such as instagram (which is owned by facebook) or snapchat or what-have-you or doesn't cover all of facebook's core featureset or is a worse experience or is run incompetently in some way (/cough/twitter/cough/). The way that these switchovers happen is early adopters start doing lots of cool shit somewhere else and then a subset of people start following them there. You act like it's an onerous thing to do so, but this is meat and potatoes run of the mill shit for digital natives in the 21st century. Almost no one on planet Earth has a single social media account. If you have one you likely have several. Facebook, instagram, tumblr, twitter, snapchat, slack, discord, whatsapp, groupme, hangouts, AND SO ON. You will use whatever means is most convenient for keeping up with your friends, that's just the nature of life today. If your best friend starts using "something else" a lot then you are going to be incentivized to check it out. If you're young you are even more likely to invest the time and energy in exploring new platforms, if you're older it may take more effort but it's just a matter of how much. If some other platform is truly more compelling than facebook then people are going to engage with each other more there, which will encourage more people to check it out, more people to adopt it as one of their primary modes of keeping in touch, and a preference cascade to start. What all this means is that facebook's marketshare of the social media landscape is actually surprisingly tenuous. A truly superior competitor could unravel their entire market in a single year, perhaps. That may be unlikely (it's hard to say without specific examples) but it's the sort of thing that is well within the realm of possibility. Remember, people thought that myspace, blogger, flickr, etc. all had nearly unassailable locks on their respective marketshares too, but those crumbled almost overnight. Given that a lot of people use facebook right now who are nevertheless very dissatisfied with the experience of using facebook I think the situation is ripe for a turnover.