At some point, people merely adopted these platforms, transitioning from nothing to something. The notion that we can't simply transition from Facebook to nothing is nonsense.

Couldn't agree more... it's called keeping in touch with a face to face, a phone call, a letter, an email, a text etc. Your Facebook "friends" who do that are your real friends.

Its called calling, or writing those important to you. This has always existed. Quit trying to app the problem away. Its social, not technical.

I have a "friend" from university that I occasionally emailed links or articles. Months went by and he never wrote me back, so I questioned him about it and he said "you know I've been busy with the wedding and all".

"What wedding?"

"Yeah I got married, I guess you don't go on facebook. I don't reply to emails, just facebook me next time."

Obviously our friendship fizzled away, and wasn't worth keeping up, but some people only use facebook and won't communicate with people other ways. It's weird.

Yeah, sometimes the issue isn't ourselves but those we want to stay connected to and some of them really don't desire to stay connected any other way.

Facebook free for 6 years and I find no reason to have it. At most when Facebook loyals use it to organize events. And I find it about those through actually seeing people. Plus I love shocking people with "yeah I don't use that crap" to see how they react. Maybe given recent events they will react differently?

No problem. I found some cool new facebook replacements the other day.

1. IRC 2. Email 3. Forums 4. Blogs 5. RSS

for sure decentralised. I want to be running a node

I would hope so too, but without _massive_ changes I sincerely doubt the general public would adopt a decentralized social network.