I think if that happened, something even worse than Facebook would take over. The social media Pandora box as been already opened, it's not going to get better unless there is a sustained and orchestrated effort to rein in social medias and how they deal with personal info.
There are several of those in the form of alternate networks, (Minds.com, Mastodon, etc) which could very well rise to prominence if Facebook were to fall.
The issues with corporate social media are now well understood by large swathes of the public.
The incumbents are still standing due to their powerful network effects - if they lose those, the public may be a bit more discerning in where they head next.
"The issues with corporate social media are now well understood by large swathes of the public."
Are they? Most of the people I know are still all "gimme my feed, gimme my like buttons", and couldn't care less about anything, as long as they get to read about their parent's neighbour's cat's cousin's trip to Whereverville, or see latest pictures of our Nancy's baby boy.
I intended "large swathes" to mean "a significant enough plurality to potentially carry influence" not necessarily "overwhelmingly large majority". Maybe I'm overly optimistic.
I visited a mastodon site, and browsed for a bit with a new account. It didn't seem that different from Twitter. They are going to really need to push the envelope and take whatever advantage possible from its decentralized architecture if there is any hope of gaining mainstream traction.
That is kinda hard to predict. All those efforts by various people to create a decentralized social networks might finally find traction, if FB crashes. At least we can hope. I suppose it could go either way
Problem with decentralized social networks is there’s no money to pay designers and developers and so the software is primitive. The ICO model is the closest anyone’s come to a funding story, and that has its own problems.
Why is there a need for changing software? What are all the FB devs doing all day really except ads tuning.
I want a feed of freinds writing everyday bullshit and that just got worse by time untill I no longer use Facebook. It's like chat apps like MSN Messenger that stayed the same for years with no problems what so ever.
