Yet users use HN, Discord, and many other forums. I think "there can be only one" is what's misguided.

I did not say there should be only one. My assertion is that there are so many that the piece of the pie that remains for blue sky if the keep this invite only idea will diminish as time goes by.

I think over the past couple of decades the market has proven out that there can really only be one in a niche

I disagree. It’s obviously wrong in the general case (e.g. look at note-taking or messaging apps), and there are all kinds of discussion forums with overlapping topics. Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Discord, Mastodon and Twitter all have overlapping use cases. Maybe my view is colored by not caring about “the market”. But there’s certainly space for more than one micro-blogging platform.

I disagree with you. Facebook, instagram, telegram, and discord are all very different. People use them in different contexts for different reasons.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Discord, Youtube, Twitch all have specific niches in which they are dominant and cannot be unseated except through their own fault.

Messaging apps are a little more loose, I’ll give you that.

HN is not a network.

Discord is not comparable to a forum at all. It’s a messaging app first and foremost. Anyone attempting to use it as a forum is shoving a square peg into a round hole with a screwdriver.

Are you including Discord in the list of people using Discord as a forums?

https://discord.com/blog/forum-channels-space-for-organized-...

Not trying to be sarcastic, just haven't had a chance to use this feature and wasn't sure if you were taking that into account.

Forum channels are a bandaid solution for those people who refuse to use proper forums. It’s alright at what it does but it’s hardly the same. Far closer to ”Issues” on GitHub. In fact that’s mainly what I see it used for, issues and documentation that would benefit from its own indexable websites.

Hundreds of millions of people writing and interacting with each other is exactly the moat Twitter had when BlueSky was started.

I agree but a moat is not a “stone” - or not sure how to name this.

A series of bad decisions let a lot of people to not want to continue build their audience on twitter.

Sure but the new king of Twitter decided to open the gates and try to burn down his castle because the castle upkeep and providing for his retainers was too expensive.

Clubhouse dropped off because they lost their secret sauce (exclusivity) the moment they opened invites up to nearly everyone.

It's still alive. But it's specifically them scaling up that killed their relevance because it turned out social audio was even better as a place for bullies and extremists than it is as an exclusive popular person hangout.

I personally think that it was Twitter Spaces that killed Clubhouse. Clubhouse was pretty novel when it came out, but it had the major downside that your network wasn't there like it was on Twitter and you needed an invite. It was the cool thing when it was the only game in town but once Twitter Spaces came out people realized that you could do the exact same thing over there without needing an invite and you had your entire network there.

It's the same thing that happened to Snapchat when IG Stories came out. Except in the case of Clubhouse it happened even quicker because their was no technical moat.

Clubhouse died because it was a bad idea. Twitter Spaces hasn't succeeded either.