> In 2020, it is still too difficult for everyone to set up their own website, so they settle for a page on someone else's [for] exchanging content with friends and family
This is patently not true. People were using email for this prior to Facebook's existence, which worked well enough ("Share photos via email! Share videos via email! Here's a funny story from grandma! RSVP to my birthday!") and was painless to set up; in fact, all the people who have Facebooks also have emails! But very few people are doing this anymore as their main mode of communication with friends and family; this kind of activity is now happening on Facebook, where people are happy with the ease that it facilitates. Small networks works fine, but nobody's interested, hence why Facebook is worth billions and billions of dollars and is a large website.
You say "nobody's interested". That of course is "patently false". For one, pwdisswordfish2 is apparently interested. The author and other users of the software he/she says she uses are obviously interested. There are numerous projects that aim to use overlays. The overlay idea was used by one company that sold multiple times, ultimately to Microsoft for billions of dollars. The HN readers who upvoted the comment describing small overlays are presumably interested in seeing the idea presented in a comment.
The stated purpose of this forum is intellectual curiosity. There is nothing in bobthepanda's comments that is directed at that stated purpose. Why is he/she arguing about email usage when the quoted sentence refers to setting up websites? This looks like more of the "straw man" argument technique.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
This is patently not true. People were using email for this prior to Facebook's existence, which worked well enough ("Share photos via email! Share videos via email! Here's a funny story from grandma! RSVP to my birthday!") and was painless to set up; in fact, all the people who have Facebooks also have emails! But very few people are doing this anymore as their main mode of communication with friends and family; this kind of activity is now happening on Facebook, where people are happy with the ease that it facilitates. Small networks works fine, but nobody's interested, hence why Facebook is worth billions and billions of dollars and is a large website.