>there were blogs/personal websites, forums, email and instant messaging. If you're listing those as Facebook alternatives, you misunderstand the key ingredien

>there were blogs/personal websites, forums, email and instant messaging. If you're listing those as Facebook alternatives, you misunderstand the key ingredient that made Facebook get adopted by billions of non-technical mainstream users: the real name identities. The other communications platforms of dial-up BBSs, USENET, Geocities, personal Wordpress, vBulletin/phpBB forums, AOL AIM ... do not have strong real-name identities for non-tech people to find each other. Anonymous/pseudonymous online handles and cryptic login names have too much friction of discovery and are not scalable to a billion users. (Previous comment about the real Rolodex acting as database primary key: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15294086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15294086) Facebook (possibly accidentally) bootstrapped the psychology of users creating logins with their real name in 2004 because Harvard students want to find each other on the service. In turn, as other schools were added on, other students were motivated to use their real names to interact with friends in other schools. The social graph of real names becomes so viable that old high school alumni that were "lost" can now find each other again and grandparents can easily now keep track of grandchildren's baby photos. The fake names of USENET and other forums prevent that from happening. Emails don't work for social network growth because you can't derive an email address from a real name you know. Someone has to tell you the exact spelling of their email address. With Facebook, you can just find them by their real name (or their real phone number) and send a "friend request". >All these options worked for expressing one's self online The secret sauce to Facebook's dominance is its accumulation of real identities and not because it gives Facebook users a way to "express themselves". E.g. A lot of grandparents following grandchildren photos don't post anything. Consider direction of cause & effect: - easier evolution of platform: a bunch of users login with real names to follow/poke each other --> easy to build on that network into groups for discussion, shared calendar events, share news articles, etc - harder to grow platform: start with discussion forum software with fake names --> impossible to build a giant sticky social network graph from that base Facebook & Linkedin built on real names. WhatsApp growth built on real phone numbers. Platforms built on real identities will naturally centralize because nobody has come up with a viable decentralized alternative for a universal identity database. Ideas like web-of-trust, blockchain, keybase.io, etc don't accomplish the same thing as Facebook's real_id database. [To downvoters, if you have a better explanation of how Facebook got mass adoption by non-tech people in ways that didn't happen with USENET and vBulletin web discussion forums, please reply with your thoughts.]