[uselesscynicism]

A dystopia with fewer people in poverty than ever, and the ability to communicate instantly with people around the globe, while we wander to the supermarket and buy plentiful food sourced from all over the world at prices normal people can afford, to go home and sit in climate controlled homes and entertain ourselves with endless games and have our housework eased by machines that wash our clothes and dishes with water that flows freely into our homes and doesn't need to be fetched, and we choose when our next child will be born

Yes what a dystopia we live in

[Mistletoe]

A dystopia where the White House was stormed and 703,000 Americans are dead from Covid while 56% of the population is fully vaccinated. A dystopia where the world seems more divided than ever, and I attribute a very large portion of the blame on the tech giants that are profiting from human misery.

[ipaddr]

The world is more connected than ever before. White house getting stormed by unarmed protestors is much better world then presidents getting shot (and dying) like what happened in the 80s, 60s.

Global warning may feel hopeless but compare that to the threat of ozone layer disappearing or acid rain or..

Covid has kill 700+ h1n1 killed 575+. wwi+ii millions

People are so much safer and less likely to die but we have so much more media so we invent things to be scared of because people want you to pay attention to their ads.

[prirai]

You mentioned the pros.

[streamofdigits]

your framing is wrong at multiple levels.

i) facebook has not contributed an iota to the consumerist utopia you seem to cherish. it is the result of a long period of scientific / technological development. communicating instantly with people around the globe can be done perfectly well with, e.g. Signal. you do not need the apparatus of surveillance capitalism to deliver it.

ii) said consumerist utopia is neither available to large fractions of humanity, nor is it environmentally sustainable for those who currently enjoy it beyond a few more decades

More fundamentally, if we do not develop "social media" that are trully social: actually promote global mutual understanding, support fact based consensus, promote the genuine empowerment of individuals instead of exploiting and aggravating their ignorance etc. many of the real gains and progress (<ref>Hans Rosling</ref>) achieved in the past century will be squandered, never to return

[kishinmanglani]

Facebook hasn't contributed one iota? Facebook has contributed an immense amount to the developer community, small businesses and literally everyone else.

Free communication with almost any human on the planet: check. Advertise alongside industry incumbents with any ad budget: check. Oh yeah and React, React Native, GraphQL, pyTorch, and a whole lot more.

[streamofdigits]

"Free communication" in... exchange for personal data. But thats a price that is invisible to fanboys. Exploiting those who either can't understand or who can't afford the tiny cost of communicating with data privacy.

As for small businesses, its walled garden simply cannibalized their earlier websites and made every small trader dependent upon opaque and arbitrary discovery algorithms that can wipe them out without warning.

The open source projects you mention have multiple alternatives, many from genuine community projects that will sustain irrespective of a corporate sponsor.