If facebook was required to have some level of across-platform access, this might level the playing field and give us actual choice. Unfortunatly, I think this will take legislative action to accomplish. Until then, luck and time might change the course of things.

That would be very interesting, and I think it would be a good idea. But I imagine it would be rather hard to pull of on the technical side, even if Facebook full-heartedly supported such an effort, and I don't want to begin to think of the kind of pressure we would have to put on our politicians to create such a law without making humongous mess out of it.

Whatever replaces Facebook will have to be "cool" enough to get people to actually want to use it. "Facebook but with better privacy" just isn't cool, so the average person isn't going to bother.

I realize a lot of people will not agree with me, however I tend to think way beyond the general human conception and as a consequence hold to a very different perspective.

I agree with you that that should not be the case. When I look at all the good things human beings have accomplished over the millennia, I cannot help but think that we can do better than this if we set our mind to it.

But life is not the way it should be (IMHO) in so many different levels in so many different ways I would not even know where to begin counting.

See https://diasporafoundation.org/

Not that they've actually made any sort of dent in the problem - as you say, the network effect is just too strong.

BTW https://mastodon.social is making some headway. I see a lot of security people have switched to it.

(My point is that IMO twitter was the most useless of all the mainstream social networks until snapchat arrived.

I reached this conclusion by seing that you can get to twitter functionality from both facebook, instagram and google+ just by removing features and introducing limitations.)

I Twitter is the most honest social network. Everything is public, the end. Unlike Facebook's "privacy" settings.