While I do agree that this space needs competition, I can't see a scenario in which this can happen. The combined user base of all the facebook apps is a considerable percentage of the world's population. Take out people with no access to internet or living in dictatorship or dictatorship-like regimes and you get probably north of 90% of all internet users. I know people in their 70's and 80's using facebook at this point. And while some countries are more skeptical about it, my country has fully embraced it. To the point where "having a website" is a synonym of "having a facebook page". In reality almost all businesses use facebook exclusively(which is a huge problem for people like me who have blocked all facebook services from my network but that's my problem). The only way a competitor could come into existence at this point the way I see it is a complete collapse of facebook as a company(as in bankruptcy). No one will ditch something that is essential to their existence for something that will only drag them down. Look at G+: IMO as a product the execution was absolutely flawless. Yet it's no more.
Competition in this space is clearly possible, or we wouldn't be discussing TikTok.
New to the Internet and young people have less qualms about trying things and are often able to spread things with word of mouth.
Google plus got mired down in the real name policy and the account consolidation and the usually problems associated with Google (which includes an association with Google).
G+ was a facebook clone that brought nearly nothing new to the picture and thus no reason to switch so it failed. Pretty simple. TikTok fills the Vine niche and then some.
Native Bulgarian here. Better candidate: yes. Good candidate: no. Yes, it is considerably simpler but it is also vastly different from the larger Slavic languages: I have friends from other Slavic countries and I've observed that Poles, Czechs, Slovaks and Ukrainians for instance have far less difficulties understanding each other than understanding me. I would assume it's the same story with Russian but I have almost 0 interaction with Russians. And even for me, it took me days in Poland to start picking up on words, phrases and sentences. Then again I can understand over 70% of Serbo-Croatian without even trying but again, those make up for a very small number of the total Slavic population.
Truth be told I have 5 or 6 raspberries. In all seriousness I think I'm actively using 3:
* A rpi zero running several scripts(hooked to slack, telegram and a private mattermost server) to monitor the health of some production services at work from home(in case the network at work goes down and all the services there fail to notify the right people). Has never happened but having it makes sleep at night a tad better.
* Rpi 3 b for some throwaway code/testing/place to store stuff at home and using it as an access server to access my home network.
* Rpi 2 b pretty much glued to my parents' router so I can access the network at their place every time there's one of those "My computer is telling me something, what do I do?". I'm sure most of you are aware that those messages are surely gonna cause the end of the universe and need to be resolved as soon as possible and could not possibly wait 2 hours.
