[relyks]

I disagree with this. Even though I'm unhappy with Facebook/Meta and I believe the world would have been better off without the current iteration of their products, lots of small businesses depend on their platforms for their marketing/advertising needs and success in general. Their instant messaging platforms like Messenger/WhatsApp are essential communication tools used by literally millions of users. There is also an argument to be made that Facebook has allowed relationships/connections to be preserved that would've eventually ceased. Facebook/Instagram are terrible tools for creating new relationships or social networks though

[cj]

I’m not a Facebook fan by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s true that Facebook is what a lot of small businesses rely on.

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.

[ryandrake]

Why couldn't these businesses move back to whatever they relied on pre-Facebook, pre-Instagram?

[maximus-decimus]

What makes you believe they existed pre-Facebook?

If they depend on facebook, it's like asking car mechanics to go back to whatever they were doing before cars were invented.

[kibwen]

Small businesses marketed before the existence Facebook, and people messaged before the existence of Facebook. They aren't doing anything special other than being the beneficiaries of the network-effect-du-jour.

[miguelazo]

>Their instant messaging platforms like Messenger/WhatsApp are essential communication tools used by literally millions of users.

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.