That's a common misconception. As a social network creator, your job is to create a substantial amount of single player value in addition to multiplayer value, precisely to avoid this sort of chicken and egg problem. If your social network isn't both useful and differentiated (i.e. doing something completely different than FB) even when no other people are using it, then you have a real problem.
That's why when Facebook launched it was basically just a prettier skin over the Harvard student directory, so that way it was valuable even if there were no other people using it.
> That's why when Facebook launched it was basically just a prettier skin over the Harvard student directory, so that way it was valuable even if there were no other people using it.
Facebook also launched in small, elite communities first, which allowed it to exploit network effects in communities that were more manageable than the global internet.
I think that many people make the mistake of thinking of the "social" network as global-level vat filled with a solution of essentially identical nodes, and the "network effect" as a power caused by a product having a high concentration in that solution. In reality, the global "social" network is more like a warehouse full of jars, and smaller players start by building up their product's concentration in a fraction of those jars, instead of all the jars at once.
Far-right tried to do exactly that with gab.ai. Turned out, there are another central authorities besides facebook..
Yes. One thing holding back competition is network effects, i.e. if I create a new social network, it isn't very useful until a significant number of people are on board. Fortunately now we have the federated social networking with the Fediverse, so a new network can piggyback on all the users in the Fediverse (and the new network in turn helps grow the Fediverse).
> A decentralized protocol/system like Mastodon allows this kind of partitioning of the social space.
Nitpick: Mastodon is a system, the protocol is ActivityPub.