AIUI, HTML won because it was free. There were competing paid for online hypermedia standards at the time, but many cost money. Anyone could make a web browser or server quite easily.

> Anyone could make a web browser or server quite easily.

Oh how times have changed. . .

> a major issue with social media is network effects preventing better apps from becoming popular.

One thing ATProto does is enable real competition in social apps, assuming they all run on the atproto fabric. One of the core hopes is that we can get everyone over to something like atproto once, to get them out of the silos, such that this is there last time they have to "move" their social network

The challenge will be that first move, yeah. Current social media companies have every incentive not to let users do that.

with every additional user, every additional post, the value of the open network only grows, and eventually becomes too big to ignore.