> Facebook has direct competitors that can overtake them in just a few years

>Instagram was made by a few python coders in months. This shows how easy it is to make a product that competes with Facebook

Then why did Facebook buy Instagram, instead whipping up some python code on their own if it's so easy?

I would conclude they bought them to be anti-competitive.

For their users.

At that point (around the time of the acquisition), I guess one could say there was significant overlap between FB and IG users, and that FB had more users than IG.

No, Instagram had a thriving mobile user base. Facebook was getting demolished by Twitter in this area at the time. FB knew the future was mobile

That clearly implies that the acquisition wasn't for the users but for the platform and the brand value associated with being present on mobile.

Parts of IG in the early days involved filters on iOS, which at the time there was no library for. My understanding. The web version was Django, yes.

By web version I'm guessing you mean server side?

Server side was a few python components with lots of tricks in Postgres for scaling purposes. You didn't have any real choices for what language you used in iOS

Yes, that's what I meant. The point I was trying to make was that just knowing server side scripting was a necessary but not sufficient condition to create a hit photo sharing app at that time, because there weren't many options on the camera at the time, and the filters were what drove the growth at that time.