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.