@evan: The relationship between people is important, not the app, and we have been trained the exact opposite way.
With an open standards approach, Metcalfe's law does not get in the way of innovation. Innovators do not need to start from zero, and they don't need to build what they otherwise would need to build because it exists already.
@mike: you don't need to build your own social network, it exists already.
@evan : a large social network cannot afford to build or maintain functionality only used by 100,000 users if it has billions of users total. That's different in the fediverse: many projects can focus on and optimize for smaller audiences.
@mike