You're misunderstanding the true sticky feature of Facebook for the billions of normal non-geek users. It's not html/css authoring; it's the real names database. In other words, the so-called "social graph" of known identities rather than something like HN/reddit which have mostly anonymous or pseudonymous ids.

I tried to explain the "Rolodex of real names" aspect in a previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18728061

A cigarette does the same. It provides value the moment it is lit and the first drag enters the lung.

I quit smoking a little more than 9 years ago. There are still quite a few moments I miss this felt value.

I quit Facebook about a year ago. I still keep the account but removed everything I ever posted there. Still as I recently started to do genealogy my SO showed me the groups she uses for that on Facebook (it is the only thing she does there). So probably I will start using FB again once I dig deeper into my ancestors as these groups are really helpful and provide value.

If these groups were some other place I would gladly be there. Sadly they are not.

Personally my ideal "social network" would be personal RSS feeds for everyone, but that's never going to be the winning method. It needs to be something dead simple for a non-techie.

I don't mean to be obtuse, I hate Googlebook more than most, but... have you tried? Where I lived before I had a fixed public IPv4, and I put a box up with Caddy on it serving markdown to the world and people actually did find it and sent me e-mails about it. All I did was post links to small forums. Granted, it wasn't exactly mainstream content. But it worked.