Which means that it could work on specific communities, right? Just as Facebook started from a single community.
The principle is already well described in Crossing the Chasm[1]. You need early adopters and then figure out from there how to go a mainstream audience.
You probably also need some groundbreaking shift in the medium to create an opportunity e.g. how shift from laptops to smaetphones made photos and videos more compelling than text for some use cases, leading to Instagram and Snapchat. And then Facebook bought Instagram and used it to make Snapchat redundant...
The killer in getting adoption of any social network is the network effect. You want to be on the social media application because your friends & family is on it.