If tommorow Meta shuts down and the entirety of its assets, all the money, all the infrastructure and the people get repurposed to do science instead of reels, commercials, cat videos, selfies and trending videos, that would be great.
It’s a good platform for certain types of businesses to share information with a lot of people in a channel other than email. Think gyms, restaurants, salons, laundromats, etc.
And then there are people whose businesses run on Facebook. Not that it’s a common thing, but I actually pay a fitness instructor $25/mo to join daily group fitness classes that anre available exclusively via Facebook Live.
If Facebook were to go away, the biggest missing piece up for grabs would be a common platform used by a lot of people to broadcast information to people who share things in common.
If they depend on facebook, it's like asking car mechanics to go back to whatever they were doing before cars were invented.
As if in the absence of this parasitic monopoly an alternative couldn’t be spun up in a matter of days, maybe weeks, given modern frameworks and cloud infrastructure. Hell, they bought WhatsApp. Most of what they have done to it just made it worse or knocked off features from other platforms like Telegram.
I think we need to be able to take a look at ourselves and evaluate what's chaff as tech evolves.
Desire is a stronger force in this universe than need.