Hey there, thanks for what has to be the most insightful and constructive comment of the thread! I agree with what you're saying. To me, all this is part of a

Hey there, thanks for what has to be the most insightful and constructive comment of the thread! I agree with what you're saying. To me, all this is part of a bigger issue which is the "mass culture". That society is only comfortable with having one, perhaps two, providers for every kind of service is similar to the fact that apparently, society needs blockbusters and music hits to find some kind of balance. So that when you meet someone, you actually have common points to discuss. I haven't yet taken the time to address that issue in blog form, though, because it's really complex and I don't want to half-ass it. I don't think it'll ever be completely solved in this lifetime either. Part of the social factors that, for example, prevent a mass migration from Facebook or Twitter are the network effects you mention "People go to that site as well because it has the best and most active conversation.". In my opinion, this can be somewhat mitigated by having open protocols for everything. If the discussion happens not on a single platform, but on a set of platforms all talking the same language, you could (in theory) use any client to follow the discussion and it wouldn't even matter where the video is hosted. Online identity and presence is very hard to define/to bound: e-mail is hard to switch because your e-mail address contains the domain name of your provider (user@provider.tld). It's easier to switch from a web hosting company to another because there you usually control the DNS (except if you're stuck with a subdomain, which sucks) - so for example, I've been able to switch amos.me from ImmediateVPS to Linode to prgmr without any downtime/relocation issues. E-mail is similarly easy to switch if you own the domain name. But e-mail and personal websites are only part of your online identity: usually, your whole identity is spread among several services: Twitter, Tumblr, HackerNews, Reddit, Flickr. Most people use their homepage as hub/registry to list all their online accounts, but there has to be a better way. But, again, the thing about open protocols is that reducing the switching cost from one service to another is generally not in the interest of any single provider. Only few companies have convictions strong enough to really make migrations seamless. For others, they're mostly coerced to do so because of privacy laws (example: Google's Data Liberation Front) and give you a .zip of your data, but you can't just seamlessly import it into another service. This discussion is too vast, really. I'd love to see the death of mass culture and to see a reversal in the centralization process, but, like you, I have my doubts and questions about it.