I remember switching to gmail only because they offered 1Gb of storage, which at the time other email hosts were only offering for paid subscribers. In my circle this was the biggest reason to switch, not because the UX was much better than any other providers.

Storage capacity is a part of the eXperience story.

Before Gmail's groundbreaking 1GB limit, you had offerings like 15mb or 100mb from yahoo or hotmail. What that meant for your day to day experience would be that you would literally run out of space and then have to manually comb through your inbox to delete things you don't want. And if you wanted stuff, you had to harshly prioritize between treasured message threads.

These are all part of the UX

Just want to highlight that this is a very tech-focused perspective. "If we make it good enough people will use it!"

Also is there room in this utopia for people who want their privacy and secrecy? Will they be disadvantaged if they don't participate in this digital phone booth? My gut tells me yes.

I don’t think they’re making an argument that it’s sufficient to attract people, but that it is necessary.

Obviously any sort of serious effort will need some sort of marketing or other social push, but you can market a pile of dog poop all you want and nobody will be interested.

Those that don't have Facebook are already disadvantaged in that way. They don't get invited to the party, they aren't told about life updates via the feed. But you soon self-select for friends that don't use Facebook and that do invite you to parties and tell you about things.

That same divide isn't going to go away, no matter the technology. (ofc replace Facebook with whatever app is popular with your group.)

Perhaps from your vantage point. My vantage point is more and more people are ditching the social sites for real connections again. A few years ago when privacy issue after privacy issue came out, and the revelations on how manipulated we all are on social media by algorithms, my circle decided to ditch social media. I was always the "pioneer" in this front, having ditched it around 2015 or so.

The craziest thing started happening when I got rid of it. I started getting these crazy old things called "phone calls." And people started sending out these really cool decorated cards called "invitations" that apparently come to my house through this really old but fascinating technology called "mail". Real life actual people started walking past me on my neighborhood road and inviting me to house parties or get-togethers again. I met so many wonderful neighbors since!

It had this amazing other side effect as well: it acted like a filter for all the events I used to "miss". Suddenly, it's as if the weight of FOMO was lifted off my shoulders.

But illustrative snark aside, I suppose its going to vary from circle to circle and group to group. My hunch tells me a lot more people simply tolerate social media because they realize much of society has hitched it's wagon to it, and they see this as an unfortunate thing, and it will take just one person in the group to break the mold.

I too see people in my circle ditching social media, but the transition seems to have been to messenger apps. People will message directly to each other, or in group chatrooms.

Yes I have definitely seen signal use increase by my very non academic estimate of 10x. I see a "so and so contact has joined Signal!" notification every few days consistently for a while now.

Email and Mastodon have a similar issues in that they combine two different layers of functionality into a single protocol. The bottom layers (identity and social graph respectively) would be better served by not being tied to specific form of communication (the top layers).

If we could separate out these layers I think you would find that the user experience would be easier to improve and evolve more cleanly over time, with multiple formats and protocols being built upon a base abstraction layer.