> Building an Instagram clone the way it used to be is fairly trivial these days. I could probably throw one together in a few months, but growing its popularit

> Building an Instagram clone the way it used to be is fairly trivial these days. I could probably throw one together in a few months, but growing its popularity is practically impossible these days with such entrenched incumbents and no niches left to start a user base with. Setting aside the fact that the social media platform you are cloning is probably going to sue you for copyright infringement if it takes off, you'd still be fighting the network effect. I'm not saying it is impossible, but I doubt that building a clone of a product will successfully move people from the original. Signal and telegram haven't been able to best WhatsApp. Building it in a decentralized way probably makes it even harder.