> and Microsoft giving up on Windows phones were both mistakes.

You hit me right in the gut, are we long lost siblings? Lol

I never tried a Windows phone - but everyone I knew with one loved them. (Most of the owners worked for Microsoft...)

I loved Google+ - it was like Facebook without the dark patterns. So of course, nobody was on it (which I didn't dislike exactly).

it goes back even further - LiveJournal, which was a social network like any other - more importantly without algorithmic optimization.

As I understand my FB account, I can easily post to a group. But I can't easily adjust the membership of that group. Otoh, I post maybe once a year, so who knows.

> it requires some manual work, which most users aren't gonna bother with

Dowsing a user's circles from their public information and Gmail inbox seems like a perfect task for AI.

I don’t think it’s about the effort needed. The basic idea is just too complex for most people.

It was worse than that: they forced _everyone_ into it, whether or not you had any interest in using it.

They did this before having notification control or usable filtering[1] so what this meant was for most of year, you'd login to Gmail and see the upper right notification badge be !!!LOOK AT ME!!! red only to click on it and see it was telling you that some dude who no-showed on a Craigslist sale 10 years ago in a different city had been forced to “join” Google+. Even worse, it took like 6 months for their iOS developers to give you any control over push notifications so you got all of that as push notifications until you deleted the app.

They also annoyed key communities like Google Reader users: that wasn't their largest popular social network but it was one which people actually liked and it disproportionately skewed towards people like journalists, bloggers, etc. who recommended technology to other people. The conversion to Google+ was really clumsy and they did things like replacing the popular Reader commenting system with a Google+ “integration” which didn't work at all on mobile devices[2], which meant that a ton of influential people had a really negative experience and told everyone they knew about it.

1. The “circles” idea reportedly worked well when it was Google employees using it internally but it relied on the poster picking an audience for a post, which failed in the real world when the spammiest people think everyone is interested in their every word.

2. The dialog was sized for a desktop display so the post button was inaccessible off the screen.

Thats not the only thing that killed google+ though. I think their aggressive push was their demise, forced all their users to use google+, mangled with youtube and gmail accounts and all that pissed off a lot of users.

> the same thing that prevented Bluesky from ever being good.

That's not it at all. Bluesky is simply just too political.

X is too political. Bluesky is too political. When you focus on content and sharing and having a good time, then the network takes off.

I'm not saying politics isn't important. I'm saying it can't become the miasma that pervades the entire service and makes the entire point of the social network complaining about politics, polarized attacks, etc.

Also Discord - tons of people use Discord as a social network and keep up with friends. I must have 5 friend groups that have their own Discords with some overlap.

Arbitrary labels make it really easy to give groups of close friends silly in-joke names rather than "close friends"...