Livre d'Or

Yes, I think you're right, there are some things that Facebook makes easy, and they're fairly good at directing you to new habits when they change the layout around. As people pointed out in your discussion, for all DW's good work in improving the UI compared to LJ, it's kind of ridiculous that you can't make a new post from within your journal, and even from the homepage you have to mouse over a menu item labelled "Create" and then click on "Post entry" to make a new post (even the decision to use the term "entry" rather than "post" was misguided, I think, because everybody uses "post" as the noun for all sorts of related things these days). If you were new to the site you'd never find that.

I don't think anyone, even non-geeks, likes the algorithmically generated feed. Everyone wants FB to show them all content and do any filtering in their own heads. But I agree the suggestions of friends-of-friends are probably helpful even if I find them annoying cos I don't like being told what to think!

It is definitely true that signing up to a new website might be a giant hurdle. It really is, even for entirely abled people with lots of leisure time. Even if the new site is 10 times better, that initial hurdle is still really hard to overcome. I do think Ello was clever in advertising itself not just as better than FB, but as fixing specific problems that people were having with FB. I agree with your assessment that it was a flash in the pan, though; even two weeks on this post is out of date already!