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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

As astounding as this number is - and the longer I think about it the more mind blowing it gets - Facebook is all-but the single-point-of-failure for an Internet that was designed not to do that.

I look forward to the day we build these new protocols (sharing, social graphs, even search) in open distributed ways - the day Facebook becomes AOL in other words. I'm just not sure how.

And if I was any non-US culture-aligned country, I would be wondering how to build that replacement - this is like television in the 1950s, but everyone around the world is watching NBC.

But boy does 100bn dollars look cheap now.

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What's the big deal if Facebook goes down? If it's important, I email (Gmail going down would be more dire, I think). Or I can text people if I have their number. Or send a Hangout. Or Whatsapp. Or Skype. Or call them. Facebook has monopolized social media, not all communication.

To add to your point, studies show that people use FB to keep contact with their existing friends; not to meet new ones. This means in most cases FB is not the only communication channel one has with their friends.

Will have to also consider, FB login is most popular 3rd party login, add to that facebook comments and other widgets on 3rd party sites. FB going down will have a substantial impact

That's true, I forgot about that. Thankfully, most of the sites I use that have FB login are just for entertainment, not communication or anything serious. But that's true.

There is a more likely possibility that there are some people whose entire idea of the internet was/is/will continue to be FB. Someone will be born, raised, and die thinking FB is the whole internet. Someone else WeChat.

It's a social failure, not a technical one. There are decentralized social networks, but people are stuck in FB with various excuses despite constantly complaining about privacy and other problems.

There are decentralized social networks, but how many of them could actually scale to the size of FB?

Good question, since I don't think it was tested ;) With full decentralization they should be able to scale, but theory should be tested by practice.

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