this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
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Maybe I should just create the new Facebook as well
Drop the 'the', just call it 'new facebook'. Thank me later.
Ah, the old American naming convention
Its more or less a quote from the movie.
Hmmmm people like services which are actually better than what Facebook currently offers. Maybe free dating apps, cool games and meet up services could attract new users. Get me a team and some beers and pizza, and I will make new Facebook.
However I will never be able to outcompete META. That is a different story. That is an insane company with the craziest infrastructure.
It's all about networks. It's not creating platforms that's hard, it's getting people to use them.
It is super hard! However we should not give up just because it is hard or not possible. Anything is possible with right determination
We choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy.
We shouldn't give up, but not everything that is possible happens, so just be aware that most ventures fail. But of course keep trying. Like with Lemmy.
A good product and marketing strategy can bootstrap an audience. You likely need to provide something beyond just a phone book. Even outside of Facebook there's a million of those but getting an audience for a new product is far from impossible, tons of new games do it all the time.
The numbers are staggering. A game is incomparable. Facebook has over 3 billion users and instagram has another 2.5. Even a game like Fortnite “only” has a bit over 600 million users, and the vast majority of games see nowhere near that
You can bootstrap an audience in the millions, maybe, with a lot of luck, but getting to meta numbers takes significant capital to sustain your advertising. More importantly even with that it will still take ages. Facebook took almost a decade to get to a billion. Reddit took 18 years
Both platforms (and twitter, etc) are obviously infested with bots but what’s interesting is that from some research it appears the percentage of user accounts that are bots are far lower than many guess. I’ve seen people guess like 50+%. Per Facebook it’s more like 4-5%, and while Reddit doesn’t disclose based on content removal the numbers are similar (possibly slightly lower). This is definitely underreported though as it’s in their best interest to inflate user counts. Independent research pegs it closer to 20%. But the really interesting part is what validates the people guessing 50+%, which is user activity. Neither network comments on this but independent research pegs bots as responsible for like 50-70% of user activity.
So if you can get a network going with power users you can make it feel much more alive with possibly only 30% of the user base. But that’s where the staggering numbers come in. For Facebook that’s still 900 million people, almost 3x the entire population of america
I think you can start with niches or regional groups, they then start inviting others in.
WhatsApp and Discord basically had to bootstrap themselves and did it through niches and meeting a clear market need but we're then bought up by Facebook. There were plenty of group chat competitors and voice chat competitors.
Discord is privately owned still but you bring up another key point: the players you’re up against are so powerful, with so much wealth and the most comprehensive legal representation, that even if you manage to have some success they will either buy you or destroy you. Meta has a presence on the fediverse, even