I live in a rural community. Facebook has more or less replaced the web here.

Businesses post their hours, specials, and information on Facebook. Some of them don't have websites. The rec centre has a hard time keeping their website up to date, but the Facebook group is always accurate. Newspapers have closed down, so a Facebook group keeps people apprised of what's going on (it seems to be pretty accurate, since everyone in town is part of it, people involved in events chime in). Kids and adults sports groups advertise and tell their members what's going on via Facebook groups.

It's a shitty medium, since the Facebook algorithm mixes trash advertisements with town-specific events, but it seems to suffice for the town's needs.

I suspect it isn't just my town. The network effect is strong, so I suspect there are niche communities where Facebook is verging on ubiquitous.

I have never been a Facebook user so I'm mostly guessing.

But I think there was a heyday where people spent a great deal of time on there.

Now they don't. They just log on when it's needed to get ahold of someone or check a specific niche community.

Thus it's dying because the ad revenue is way down. It's in decline not because it lacks users, but because they no longer spend hours there.

A lot of users are also from poorer countries that lack the means to create their own web infrastructure. Using Facebook to run your business account is easier, cheaper, and more reliable than most alternatives there. Phone carriers and ISP often also have "free"-data for certain social media platforms. You get 1GB+1GB for Facebook/IG/YT/Some Game. So you are stuck in this loop where everything reinforces itself to use Facebook.

1. It’s established
2. It is a general purpose platform: it has personal posting, business listings, messaging, groups, communities, photos, news, clip format video, live streaming, p2p sales, business sales, event coordination and advertising, payment processing and cash sharing, games…
   Most other platforms do one or several of those things much better than FB, but FB is good enough for lots of people. It’s a one stop shop, and it does a fair job at cross pollinating the various aspects of its platform. It has enough stuff to keep to keep users engaged even if their interest wanes from one or more particular platform components.

Many overseas countries have Facebook preloaded on a lot of their phones. They also have data caps but Facebook is exempt from counting towards their data cap.

Facebook was extremely aggressive in getting their software preloaded on all hardware sold in developing areas over the last 20 years. So countries like India (with one and a half billion people by itself) have a large segment of users that think Facebook is the internet. It's Zucks ultimate walled garden.

3 billion of those people likely access Facebook for everything that we think of as online. Commerce, social networking, music, videos, it's all on Facebook.

Marketplace and local groups for the tea.

Lotta people keep Facebook for the marketplace.

Also, a lot of scammers make accounts to use for the marketplace.

The marketplace fluffs the numbers.

There are plenty of people for whom Facebook may as well be the entire Internet. Not just demographic groups but entire countries. It's definitely in decline with the demographic that uses Reddit, Lemmy, and discord -- but several billion average users don't disappear overnight

Hobby groups. Marketplace. Business page for companies. Everything except its original purpose of keeping up with the lives of your real life friends.

It's dying in the sense that no Millenials really uses Facebook the same way we did as when it first started, and most Gen Z would treat having a Facebook page to be a completely alien concept.

People moved on.

Because people have those family members who insist on doing everything on Facebook Messenger, and that Signal or even fucking Whatsapp is too fiddly for them. So everyone ends up with the lowest common piece of shit network, and it counts them as active users whether they actually use it or not and just happens to be checking for messages in the background.

It was years ago, but I used to work for a US based ISP. I'm a Canadian and the place I was working at had a contract to suppliment their support team.

My team did enhanced support, beyond what the ISP would deal with. Basically it was remote geek squad type service for people's computers.

While I was working there in the mid 2000's, there was a Facebook outage. All of Facebook's services were unavailable. We broke records with how many calls we got that day. Almost all of them went something like this:

Client: "the internet doesn't work!" Tech: can you open a browser and... Client (interrupting) "it says page cannot be displayed!!11" Tech: I understand, can you tell me what it says at the top in the address bar? (Insert some explaining of how to find the address bar) Client: "facebook.com" Tech: okay, I want you to click on that and erase it, then type in google.com, hit enter, and tell me what the page says. Client: " it says Google, with a (some bad description of a text entry field)" Tech: this is Google's website, it loaded from the internet, so your internet works. Facebook is down. Client (without missing a beat): "can you fix Facebook?" Tech: No. (Call ends)

I'm certain my employer made bank that day, since clients had to pay an extra monthly charge on their internet bill to speak with us, and their support made a point of dumping calls to us whenever they could. If someone wanted to speak to another tech, sure, but you have to buy this service....

I did not like that job. I actually got a call from an inexperienced Linux user who couldn't get DNS resolution. I tried to coach him over the phone to determine if his internet was working at all. Before I could actually give him an answer, my manager dropped by (he was monitoring the call) and told me to tell him we could not help him, that the support center only supported Windows based systems, since, out of everyone there, I was the only one with enough Linux knowledge to know what to do, and he didn't want to give anyone the impression that we could help with Linux.

All the guy needed to do was change his resolv.conf to valid DNS servers and he would have been fine. It doesn't work that way anymore, but it did at the time, and I knew it. I did not feel good getting off of that call. It's like, I have the answer, this guy needs the answer, he paid to speak to me, and I really want to help him out, but I would probably lose my job if I do. I was very blunt with him. I said that I could help him, but I wasn't allowed to. He understood, but I still felt like shit. I was too timid to realize my worth, which was part of the reason I was there to begin with.... Now, I would have just made it clear that he'll only get help on this once, and when we hung up, never expect to reach me again, and that nobody here knows what I do about this stuff, then helped him anyways. Fuck that manager. I'm so glad I don't work there anymore.

I finally deleted mine the other day. No goodbyes, no fanfare, just dumped it like the garbage it is. No regrets.

In most of developing countries (Africa and SEA) is free and dosnt require an active internet connection, so literally everyone with an old phone has access to it

People don't use Facebook, hence you find them on other platforms. They may be thinking that if they don't use it, then nobody does.

But you also have to consider where these people live. It might be "dying" there, while Facebook is getting new users in other markets. I remember watching a video about genocide in Myanmar and the role that Facebook played. Access to Facebook was free if I recall correctly, it was the internet for most people.

It'd be interesting to see data by country.

And even better question is why people still treat the twelfth most popular social media platform like it's an indispensable town square?

I live in Morocco. I keep leaving Facebook for months but I end up going back there even though I don't like it at all. The reason is that all the people I know and all local content is available only through Facebook. There are hardly any Moroccans on the Fediverse, I've only seen like one other person in all my years of using Mastodon. If I wanna see what's going on in the country, the city and anything related to the region then I am obliged to be on Facebook. I suppose this is the case with most developing and non-english speaking countries.

I still have it because it's still the easiest and most convenient way to message people that you've just met. There's a sort of snowball effect in which having lots of people incentives even more people to stay on the platform. Nobody I know actually uses Facebook as a social media site - they only use it for Messenger.

Although, I've found that more and more people are starting to use SMS as their first choice rather than Messenger

It IS dying, but for the youth. And I'd even say "for the youth that resembles mine"

Yeah - I do find it odd when people say Facebook is dying, because it really isn't. Unless Zuckerberg pulls a Musk anytime soon, it isn't going anywhere - unlike Xitter, Facebook is an advertising juggernaught that makes more than enough money to keep itself afloat.

And that's not even mentioning Facebook groups, news pages, business pages, the market place, etc.. they've got fingers in many different pies, and it shows.

And even more, while it may not be popular amongst tech savvy folks, it is still insanely popular amongst regular folks. I for one can vouch that a significant proportion of my non-techy friends use either it or Instagram as their primary social media.

Hell, that's why messenger is up there too - everyone has Facebook, so everyone has messenger, making it extremely convenient to message people you know. It's certainly why I use it a lot, it's where my friends are.

Meta dominates social media even now - just look at your list. Of the top seven, over half of them are Meta.

Old people

I notice Reddit isn't in that list

It's probably because people on Discord and Reddit aren't fully reflective of the wider world population.

The same goes for Twitter. It's losing users, but there are still lots of them.

They're popular because they offer something to its users. It's truly as simple as that.