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I wonder if it is more that users are addicted to twitter or facebook than they like the services. Or if it is more a thing of everbody else is on there. I am

I wonder if it is more that users are addicted to twitter or facebook than they like the services. Or if it is more a thing of everbody else is on there. I am confident if a free simple social network had caught on among college users about the time wikipedia started then facebook or myspace never would have been commercially viable. Almost all users prefer no ads and privacy to ads and no privacy. I disagree that that experience needs to be expensive to deliver. Imagine a decentralised social media network hosted on its users compute devices, kind of like email used to be. Aside from large streaming videos not that much processing power or storage is required per user.

nradov 5y ago
How would a free simple social network be sustained? Who would pay for the software, hardware, bandwidth, and content moderation? Asking for donations and volunteers seems unlikely to scale to the level required.
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  For instance, video hosting even 30 second videos becomes prohibitively expensive by basics of storage and bandwidth as soon as more than a few hundred videos are uploaded daily. Setting restrictive data retention policies may negate or standardize some of those costs but you would constantly be smashing into your financial limits with a platform like that. Further I do not know if enough people would be willing to pay for access to a social media site for it to ever reach millions of users. Even at 1 USD a month per person people wouldn't join in unless millions were already there to make it worthwhile.