I find the MySpace comparison tired:

* MySpace, at its peak, had around 75 MM MAU.

* Facebook's core properties (Insta, WhatsApp, Messenger/Big Blue) have around 2.6 billion MAU.

Even if I just consider FB core + Messenger, Facebook is roughly 20x larger than MySpace. Facebook, as a core product, also is growing in non-US markets, even though it has saturated the US markets for years.

MySpace and Facebook just aren't comparable anymore.

A more cogent comparison would include total available markets at the time.

75m MAU in 2008 is very different than 2.6b in 2020.

I wasn't trying to make an exhaustive comparison, but each individual contributes inertia to the market regardless of the total size of the market (see 1 below)

The MySpace argument often calls to the transient spirit of social media: one day it's hot, the other it's not. I recall Digg's death too after a controversial redesign. The issue with this argument is that:

1. Numbers not only increase inertia, but social products increase it too. If my friends aren't using a social platform neither am I, usually.

2. Facebook has such a rich culture of A/B testing that they'll never release controversial changes without a deeper understanding of the impact of those changes on engagement. They won't shoot themselves in the foot like Digg did with current leadership.

3. Facebook has a really successful history of acquisitions and its leadership is very aware of social media trends. It catches those trends early.

As a consequence of (1), I'd argue that Facebook has a tremendous moat in comparison to its peers: it has a large amount of users who are more likely to stay put. While Facebook also moves slowly as a consequence of (2) often enough, it can move really quickly on producing novel products.

Facebook certainly will face challenges in the future, but they're likely to be a lot different at this stage.

Yeah, Facebook is more akin to Google/Microsoft than it is to Myspace.

Err, didn't you just compare MySpace and Facebook by looking at their MAU?

The questions for continued relevance is if Facebook-the-company can continue to iterate Facebook-the-product, or if its codebase has grown too unwieldy, and the company's culture gone toxic, making it harder to add a feature to Facebook, compared to creating a new company, writing a bunch of code, buying content and acquiring users. Given the rise of Instagram(Acquired), Snapchat (IPOd), WhatsApp(Acquired), TikTok, it's not clear Facebook-the-company is able to innovate. It's not clear that they have to, either, given older Internet brands like Yahoo! are still around and making money.

The comparison I'd make is to email. There are reasons email will never die (along with reasons why email can't innovate), and I think some of those reasons also apply to Facebook by this point. There's just some percentage of people that won't ever move, so while, eg, IRC is no longer in its heyday, it's still alive and kicking.

Facebook, and the rest of the FAANG companies, aren't going anywhere. They have too much money and too little oversight. No one stands up to them when they buy out their competitors. We're in the 2nd Gilded Age, and I don't think this one is going to end with the government stepping up to the plate to do something about it like they did 100+ years ago.

Feels like it's already the new AOL.