We still need the 'organization' part. Clubs and social circles moved from blogs etc to Facebook because it was easy.

Room for a startup? A simple club hosting site, that does substantially what you get from a facebook club page. Maybe even a tool to scrape facebook and automatically create your ClubPage entry painlessly?

The key thing that Facebook Groups and Pages solved was the network effect. If you were on Facebook already, you could join a group or a page without signing up users. If a post from a Group or a Page came in, it came in through a common notification platform. It was the place where people already were, and if they weren't there, eventually there was enough pressure to join because "everyone else was already there". And all of this was good for Facebook, because it was at the time when they were trying to capture more users, which brought more eyeballs to ads.

I think any startup trying to solve this problem is going to have a really hard time because it will ultimately be external to the platforms where people already are, and user behavior has shown that they're inherently sticky to platforms. I wish it wasn't this way, because I think it'd be great for folks to be able to do this on their own.

Apple could / should be the one to tackle this by allowing iPhone iOS users the ability to create their own social circles. They dipped their toes into this a little with Invites.

Do we really need a central server to manage our friends and our circles? Decentralize the whole thing and it neuters FB and the ad surveillance universe.

https://mobilizon.org/ ?