The secret of success and longevity among social media wannabees is to find a niche and get big. This approach has proven so successful because of the network effect which explains that the value of a social service increases as a function of the number of others in the network. This is often explained using telephones. As more and more individuals own a phone, the opportunities to use your phone grows and this is true for anyone else in your phone network. Your phone network becomes more valuable as others join. The dark side of the network effect when it comes to technology is that even when superior technologies may become available, it is difficult to attract individuals using a competing network because you cannot take the network of individuals you have joined with you. If you are interested in innovation in social media, the network effect can retard progress.
The proposed ACCESS act (EFF description) is intended to increase the likelihood of innovation and to deal with other negative consequences of massive social media companies that have trapped so many in their networks. The act’s solution is to require some level of interoperability among competing networks. Often this is explained again using the requirements of phone companies. If you decide that AT&T better suits your needs than Verizon, you can change companies and continue to use your same phone number to call the same individuals you called when using your original carrier. What if something similar would work with WT:Social and Facebook? What if your data and connections to your friends continued if you left Facebook and moved your hosting service to WT.Social? What if it were possible to maintain an independent list of friends and their social media platform of choice and posts you generated were sent to these platforms pretty much as email “posts” can be sent to different email platforms? Companies would then have to compete based on the qualities of their service rather than how many members they had collected.