Yeah, FB is just another communications and organization tool for me. For my parents, it’s…well, a social media platform.
Of course, I came up from BBSes to Usenet, and was using GeoCities and MySpace and FB when they were just starting out, while my parents started out with CompuServe or AOL. And their usage of the internet before or during the 90s was pretty limited to things like email (work) and the groups and sites that were in the walled gardens of AOL, etc..
I and others like me were used to bouncing between platforms as new stuff arrived, and we are used to platforms and sites failing, so I don’t find myself as attached to platforms or websites. When Leon bought Twitter, I started looking elsewhere, regardless of what I had done on Twitter. I was able to archive my Twitter stuff. I tried Threads, but I’m done with them keeping it crippled on purpose to drive you to Instagram. So it was easy to pop over to Mastodon and BlueSky.
My parents and their friends found things they liked with the walled gardens like AOL, and then later on FB was everything they wanted ramped up to 11, and for them it and Amazon are the internet.
I think discussion is still going strong on places like Surly, Reddit, etc.. I heard over the years how email was going to die and be replaced by something else, yet more people are sending more emails than ever before. Same with forums. It’s possible they aren’t as popular as say 20 years ago, but I look at Discourse, Slack, Reddit, even places like Quora, and the speciality or geo-focused sites like Surly, and they are very active.
Hell, Reddit replaced Usenet completely.
Yep, FB is just another tool to me and I’m surprised it has lasted as long as it did, but I would not be surprised if somebody else came along within 5 years to…not necessarily replace it, but provide an alternative.
Reddit showed how to replace sites like Digg. FB showed how to replace MySpace, Geocities, AOL, etc. and there was obliviously a big gap between AOL and FB, but FB seems to have really sucked in the AOL fans.