No no I'm not referring to free for the consumer. Actually an email address was also a pain in the butt to obtain in the beginning, a small number of organizati

No no I'm not referring to free for the consumer. Actually an email address was also a pain in the butt to obtain in the beginning, a small number of organizations ran email servers and you had to be attending the correct university or know the right guy or something. What I'm referring to is free on the supply side. There is now free and widely available server software which not only will let you host a social network, but will also connect you to an existing social graph via ActivityPub. Prior to this, how were you going to compete with Twitter? You needed to build your own client and your own social graph and that was a huge barrier to entry. The tools which exist for a new competitor today (e.g. Mastodon and still a fairly small fediverse) are far from perfect, but they are improving and you can extend them however you like. That looks a lot like an environment where someone disruptive could appear, add value is missing, figure out a way to monetize and so on.