(Though I did think we had a few more lurkers who might vote.)

The chronological timeline and broken algorithm appears to be a really common frustration. It's also easy to solve, even for a feed with lots of items, (so long as you're not completely "WOOOOO!!!!!! SUPER SMART ALGOS!!! MACHIEN LERNIN GUD!!!!¬``" I guess).

On the user base issue, I see critical mass as a problem as much as a goal.

Yes, if there's a need of connections it's a catch 22, but if the service can be sufficiently useful before you have those connections it can be a multi-stage process.

The issue then is knowing if/when critical mass is going to hit - because it means costs sky rocketing, which needs balancing by an equivalent income or existing funds to avoid an expensive failure. If enough people were willing to pay for escaping FB then it would simplify matters - I didn't expect that, but it would be the easiest option so worth verifying.

Because they can, because there's no alternatives, because people forget way too soon, because they're a big capitalist entity that puts their own profits above all else whilst almost everyone assumes they're a public service.

> And they also found that although people hate clickbait, they also overwhelmingly click on it anyway. Idiots!

Well it's not quite that simple. If you ask: "Do you prefer headlines that help you decide if you want to read the full article before clicking" it's not surprising when 80% of people answer "Yes, of course" because pretty much only xenophons and illiterates wouldn't, right?

That doesn't mean a bunch of those same people aren't interested in clicking on "You'll never believe which two stars got in a fight on the red carpet last night!!". Maybe that's because the question is leading and they didn't give an accurate answer, or maybe because they do see enough information (stars,fight,red carpet) for them to want to view the article and don't care about the words which make others cringe.

Of course, that's how much it costs Facebook. Smaller organisations are going to pay more for servers, and generally have a whole bunch of different factors.

Who else still exists/matters?

> are useless and harmful

If they were actually useless, it'd be easy.

> need to be dealt with

How do you "deal with" something that gets constant free advertising everywhere from the BBC to bog roll?

In the time between your two posts, Facebook's userbase grew by over ten thousand. How do you respond to that?

You can't just chop Zuckerberg's head off and have everyone return to normal.

Facebook was never benign but has taken a role that should be occupied by standards, protocols, and multiple solutions.

It probably could have been done 20 years ago, but we're now in a world where we're struggling with Net Neutrality, we have gazillions of unregulated unpatchable bug ridden wifi toasters, and very few people even try to think for themselves any more.

A miracle would be nice, but it's better not to rely on one.

Even just for a day or so, and at the end if you've accidentally lost Theresa somewhere in the Canadian wilderness then no biggie, you just have to provide a replacement of equal or greater value.