This, sadly, just doesn't live up to reality. It wasn't the technical users that made Facebook popular. It was college students, and not the CS ones. I remember, I was there.

As for Instagram, again, I was there. Had that been a platform primarily for a technical audience, it wouldn't have taken it off.

The one platform you can say this about is Twitter. That, undoubtedly, started off with a much more tech audience, and grew so popular due to API integrations.

As for someone just needing to build alternatives. There have been dozens upon dozens over the years. Where are they now?

By "technical user" I don't mean just programmers, I mean people who have an above-average knowledge of computers. There are orders of magnitude more of these people than there are programmers, and they are completely unidentifiable from the outside. One might be the drummer in a local band, another is a dump truck driver, another works at a grocery store. Their above-average knowledge of computers hasn't helped them in life, but it does make them the go-to person to help their relatives get "online" or "fix their smartphone". And their friends and relatives look up to them for advice on what social media to use. Trust me, I was there.

> There have been dozens upon dozens over the years

Such as? I think you'll find that all of them were created back when Facebook wasn't completely evil (and thus couldn't even get the backing of "technical" people), or they were created with some congenital flaw that made them completely unattractive to the average person. You have to have a Steve Jobs level of eye for detail with this stuff, and sadly most people cloning Twitter in a weekend are just doing it for fun.

Alternatives such as the Fediverse are doing just fine, despite HN's categorical rejection of anything that doesn't match the big corporate platforms in scale and revenue as "viable."

Yes, and the success of fediverse, despite being hard to get into, is a testament to how much people in general want to escape being cannibalized by Meta for shareholder value. There just aren't good alternatives, because of attitudes like you can see here on HN, and investors being incredibly paranoid right now.

My impression about Fedi is that it’s much bigger than most people think it is, but those who are in it don’t like talking about it a lot.

The more people know about it, the faster it gets ruined. An unfortunate law of nature.

Luckily the fediverse already seems to push away a lot of trolls, bigots and capitalists, but it's just a matter of time.

While I agree that untamed capitalism causes nothing but damage to our societies, I do not agree that replacing one ideology with another does us any good. I have noticed a good chunk of Mastodon users signing as „communists“ in their profiles but I’m yet to understand what exactly they mean by that.

Edit: FWIW I come from a country where people considered themselves communists. Grandpa of my better half has a red star on their grave cross. IMHO ideologies are somewhat fucking people up.

By "capitalists" I meant people who only want to use the fediverse as a commercial platform like an influencer or entrepreneur. Thus far platforms using the fediverse aren't as optimized for addiction and emotional manipulation as mainstream social media platforms are, so they remain unattractive to those interests.

But yes, there are a lot of self-described communists, socialists, anarchists and other leftist types there as well.