It's a quick way to get rich. Just create a social app and wait for a billionaire to buy it.

in order to compete for ad revenue. These platforms start out owned by billionaires, they have to get VC investments.

All you need is to start one and recruit members. Get large enough and be bought out.

But creating a social media site is not that difficult. It's not easy, but not impossible.

to get to that scale.

15 years ago you might be able to code up an app and rent some servers and build a viable demo that could get acquired. Even then most of the big platforms were started by people with lots of money to begin with.

Now the social media field is essentially built out. The business model is ad revenue for eyeballs, and you can’t get meaningful revenue until you have hundreds of millions of daily users, because the big players already do that so they have locked in all the available revenue.

Of people refusing to shed themselves of Twitter/X/Shitter, what ever it's called now.

No, the problem is going to be TikTok and Youtube. The planned TikTok ban already has creators moving over to Youtube, and it'll likely get worse once the ban actually takes effect. And then we have a recent court ruling, labeling Google as a monopoly.

Given Trumps planned crusade against "Big Tech Censorship", I doubt the courts will side with Google when things start getting kicked upstairs. So Youtube being flush with new users from TikTok isn't going to make Google look any less like a monopoly.

Bluesky is yet another oligarch owned social media platform. It will enshittify itself in search of increasing profits and growth. If the owners wish to subvert its gaze farming algorithm for political propaganda purposes, they will.

If it gets like X, I'll leave.

eom

And i sure wish Taylor Swift had headed there instead.