I think we are partially to blame for this too though. For the last 10-20 years the whole goal of a founder was to grow a business, get acquired then exit. If founders instead focused on building a sustainable business maybe we would have a more diverse tech landscape.

To be fair, even the ones that don't want to get acquired know the bitter road ahead from the opposition aggression.

Nobody would fund a founder who wanted to build a sustainable business. It would have to be bootstrapped, and there are a lot of such businesses, but you never hear about them because they stay small.

It is the result of lack of regulation. They are all allowed to buy their competition.

Classic economies of scale. It’s a lot more efficient for one company to make one million services of lemonade than it is for one million people to make one serving each. Even if the homemade version is “better”.

This is what happens when everyone is incented to trade low-probability risk for short-term profits. Because who would bet that a giant CDN would be blocked like this?

I agree that oligopolies are more stable than polyopolies, but a huge part of why the internet collapsed in a handful of companies is how stock markets and venture capital love monopolies.

X is a minor player. Replace it with AWS

I meant for what it does.

Is there anything even remotely comparable to twitter (outside of the PRC)?

Bluesky, Threads, mastodon, even reddit I guess even though it's more atomized into subreddits.

Twitter has like 3 times the users of threads and bluesky has a tenth of threads.

It's a geometric progression (power law) and it almost always devolves into that.

You asked if there was something remotely comparable and there is.

Three times less does not fit that.

30 times less neither.