Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
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.