&gt; I tried, because you can argue that is silly to complain about not enough people using a social network if you don&#x27;t start using it yourself;<p>No, not at all.  That&#x27;s the Network Effect [1] in a nutshell.<p>Practically, what this means is that apart from possibly instagram, microblogging is twitter&#x27;s market to lose.  So long as twitter does not abuse the trust users have placed in them to manage the service, then upstart competitors (whether centralized or decentralized) will find it difficult to overcome the network advantage.<p>However, if twitter does not honor the informal contract and decides to abuse their power for political or social ends, they will be devaluing their product for a large segment of users.  Those betrayed users are more likely to decide en masse to join a network not subject to a centralized autocratic authority.  This accusation was in fact recently leveled against them [2], so you may see growing support for politically neutral alternatives.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Network_effect" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Network_effect</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.breitbart.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;16&#x2F;exclusive-twitter-shadowbanning-is-real-say-inside-sources&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.breitbart.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;16&#x2F;exclusive-twitter-s...</a>