It's a good question, and one for which I have an answer in my mental roadmap
for the Citadel system.
First let's address the idea of a "messaging monopoly". During the dialup
era, the potential audience of a BBS was limited to those who could reach
the site with a local call, and to a lesser extent, by the single-user nature
of most systems. Networking (federation) was a form of resource sharing,
to allow BBS operators to expand their reach by efficiently relaying messages
from site to site, allowing them to pool their user communities. As soon
as ubiquitous Internet access arrived on the scene, access was no longer a
scarcity. At that moment, being "the only Citadel in the 999 area code" was
no longer a value proposition, because anyone could connect anywhere.
To be of any value, a site had to offer something unique other than just
people getting together to have conversations.
This makes the number of sites trend downwards, and eventually network effects
kick in and you have everyone in the world on only a handful of sites; at
the extreme end, only one site (Facebook).
We discontinued networking because literally no one was using it.
This isn't to say that every Citadel will forever be an island. For our
future plans, think less of our old networked dialup sites, and think more
in terms of syndication. Think in terms of the Fediverse. Look at the growth
of things like the Mastodon network to see the future I'm banking on. Once
we have webcit-ng up and running, I intend to implement ActivityPub, OStatus,
and whatever other protocols rule the day. This means you can follow, and
be followed by, anyone on any site, regardless of whether it's Citadel or
some other software.
We won't stop there. I intend to syndicate at the room level in addition
to the user level. This means you'll be able to follow a forum on a remote
site and it'll appear right there in your feed alongside everything else.
At that point it won't matter whether your Citadel site is huge, or if you're
just running it for a local community, or just for yourself. The value is
spread around everywhere.
You speak of new sites being able to compete with Uncensored, but to be honest,
Uncensored has trouble competing with larger sites. That's exactly the reason
I need to expand our reach, and everyone will reap the benefits.
