Re: It will take a while
It would be terribly difficult bordering to impossible, because you can lead the user to water but you can't make him drink. The biggest problem with building any "social media" is the herd effect: Unless everybody uses it, nobody will.
For this reason we can only have one single big actor at any time, instead of several competing ones. And for the same reason it keeps getting bigger no matter what happens. If Google and Apple despite their billions didn't manage to compete with Facebook, it's because the market had already decided Facebook was the place to be and to be seen.
Let's take a real life example, WhatsApp since we're talking about it: You could use Signal, which is better in most ways - but, it isn't what the cool kids use, so nobody would be seen dead using it. If you don't believe me, ask a young one about switching to Signal: He/she/it will sprout a long list of mostly fallacious reasons he can't, which mostly boil down to the fact his peers expect him to be on Whatapp, because that's where the cool kids are. Inertia does the rest. WhatsApp would indeed need to become very uncool for the masses to start looking for an alternative.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
