I could agree with you even more than what I already do.
My social life is on WhatsApp groups. No one in my social circle uses Facebook Messenger for anything relevant. The number of friends' photos has steadily gone down over the years. I've switched off FB but come back when am bored and want to spend time looking at cat photos and BuzzFeed. Facebook not existing in the world would impact me minimally.
Google, and even Microsoft, on the other hand, damn if they stopped existing... I'd be fairly distressed I suppose.
I mean. Facebook owns Whatsapp. And if you're not in a WhatsApp country, the US, Korea, Japan or China, you're in a Facebook Messenger country. They handle messaging for the vast majority of the western world.
The Facebook website itself is no longer particularly useful to me, other than that it is very good at events (both private and for public event discovery). The groups feature is also handy.
Other than with Facebook's messenger, your WhatsApp social graph is in your phones addressbook. If Facebook's WhatsApp service were to be gone tomorrow you could just install the next biggest messenger and beyond minor initial fragmentation all your friends would still be there.
This wouldn't work with the Facebook Messenger, since this social graph is not stored by the user.
My social life is on WhatsApp groups. No one in my social circle uses Facebook Messenger for anything relevant. The number of friends' photos has steadily gone down over the years. I've switched off FB but come back when am bored and want to spend time looking at cat photos and BuzzFeed. Facebook not existing in the world would impact me minimally.
Google, and even Microsoft, on the other hand, damn if they stopped existing... I'd be fairly distressed I suppose.