I used the internet without facebook before it existed. I had a Facebook account for over a decade. I haven't had a Facebook account in two years.

To the extent that what you are saying is true, it is only true because these companies have walled themselves off. You used to be able to chat with Facebook users over XMPP even.

Yeah, I agree. If I remember XMPP was dropped while using that old adage of "scale", which maybe was real, but in the end the net effect is the same. Advanced users know a broader breadth of the internet while most internet users only know the depth of Facebook and other various platforms.

I guess once they got big enough there was no longer a point in interoperability, it seems like a pretty big phase transition got hit about a decade ago where suddenly each walled garden got big and valuable enough that isolation was a better strategy for them.

It just sucks for the internet. I don't think, if those companies ceased to exist, that they would automatically get recreated because of some inevitable niche or market law. I think that they got where they are because of a fluke of the times they were created in -- people could not grasp how they make money.

I understand the motivation. I work on platforms teams internally for companies (and have for a number of years). In smaller scale, this concept largely makes sense because developers at a single company come from a single culture which those developers largely have already bought into or are actively being shoveled into by corporate work. This is the role a lot of developer advocates play at companies who don't have external developer customers.

In large scale, what you're asking is more dubious. If you concede that the United States alone has 11 major cultures, then you have to begin a process of "on-boarding" everyone onto your new, structured culture that your platform is designed around. That's why these debates about who is represented in the building of the platform come about, because under that model those concerns take center stage and they should.

I guess what I'm saying is the whole problem never needed to exist. There's better ways to share information than being on one platform.