Guys, don't start an indie social network.
Don't. Just don't.
Social networks are understandably attractive, they're huge moneymakers once they're established as the middleman between consumers of information and distributors of information. If they can get to a viable size, they have great competitive advantages. They have huge public profiles-- you read about them every day.
So does a lottery ticket. A winning lottery ticket is definitely possible and makes great money. If you win.
If.
The problem lies in bootstrapping something like that, the lack of revenue while you're trying to establish the two-sided network, the perilous path to scale, the cutthroat competition between venture-backed copycats giving it all away for nothing.
Please remind yourself of the huge number of failed social networks, social networks on various flavors of VC life support praying for an acquisition, et cetera. Twitter is what, the number two biggest social network, and they barely turn a profit, especially relative to the vast amounts of capital poured into them. Medium? Barely scraping by. Reddit? Never recorded a profit. Ever.
This is saying nothing about the vast, vast boneyard of failed social experiments.
If you have to, you just absolutely must start a social network, you can't be deterred.... raise some money and hope you can get acquired. A lot of money.
Having thought a lot about starting two-sided marketplaces myself, I tend to agree that Indie Hackers would be wise to avoid winner-take-all businesses / land grabs in which the founders must focus on growth at all costs (usually without revenue) and then, in the unlikely case that they make it work, must spend the rest of their lives fighting with the likes of FAANG to maintain their winning position.
A much happier place for Indie Hackers is to develop a product that people are happy to pay for right now because it provides them with benefit right now (and doesn't need all of their friends / family / colleagues to also sign up before it has value to them).
Note that it's not impossible and sometimes it can work. Courtland (the Indie Hacker's Indie Hacker) managed to defy your advice in starting IH (which is effectively a social network for IHers) and selling it to Stripe. So it can be done, particularly if you find the right niche (where a social network doesn't look like a FB clone). Seth Godin does this with changemakers and makes millions doing it. Product Hunt does it. Pieter Levels did it with Nomad List (which initially was just a list). A number of people are doing this.
The key for an IHer is to build a house you want to live in. Find a project you'd love to work on, serving people you'd love to serve for years (who would love to pay you money). You don't need to billions or even millions of customers - find the right market and you could do it with anywhere from ten to ten thousand customers. And then you can enjoy the freedom of not having to keep large numbers of people happy (and fighting with companies trying to take your opportunity).
It bears mentioning that IH isn't.... exactly indie. It's got a bunch of funding from a parent organization with deep pockets. I'm not mad about it but listening to the origin story of IH on the podcast this week, it's not entirely a counterexample. Product Hunt was funded by A16Z and others.
The issue is mostly survival until you get to a point of scale where you can generate enough money to eat. I suppose this is sort of a subtweet, but I've been reading an IH guy bent on starting a social network after a bunch of failed projects and.... man it sounds like just a whole barrel of pain to me without funding.
i think social network for X will beat facebook, twitter...as @AndrewMackie said: