the most logical communication medium between myself and my users has been taken away.
Were you paying Facebook to provide your business [edit: I see from another post of yours that it's actually a side project--so this might not be strictly applicable to you, but I still think it's worth bringing up] with a communication medium between you and your users? I'm going to take a wild guess and say that the answer is no.
And that brings up what I see as the real issue here; actually two of them:
(1) Business owners still seem to see Facebook as a free platform that they can build on as they please, without realizing that you get what you pay for. If you're not paying Facebook, you're not their customer and your business has no leverage over them, particularly if your business is built on something they're known to dislike.
(2) Why doesn't Facebook allow businesses to pay for some kind of premium business account that lets them communicate with their users, or even alter the user interface their users see? That would solve both problems--your problem of needing a communication platform that everybody knows about, and FB's problem of not getting any benefit from third parties piggybacking off their popularity.
I agree with this, and (1) is kind of the warning I was trying to spread to other business owners, for whom this is NOT just a side project. I can get around this. Other people and businesses seem to be going "all in" on Facebook, without realizing what a huge risk they are taking.
I understood and understand the risk. That's part of the game I'm playing with them, but I also have the right to call them out when I don't like it, and to bring attention to this problem that others might have at some point.
Were you paying Facebook to provide your business [edit: I see from another post of yours that it's actually a side project--so this might not be strictly applicable to you, but I still think it's worth bringing up] with a communication medium between you and your users? I'm going to take a wild guess and say that the answer is no.
And that brings up what I see as the real issue here; actually two of them:
(1) Business owners still seem to see Facebook as a free platform that they can build on as they please, without realizing that you get what you pay for. If you're not paying Facebook, you're not their customer and your business has no leverage over them, particularly if your business is built on something they're known to dislike.
(2) Why doesn't Facebook allow businesses to pay for some kind of premium business account that lets them communicate with their users, or even alter the user interface their users see? That would solve both problems--your problem of needing a communication platform that everybody knows about, and FB's problem of not getting any benefit from third parties piggybacking off their popularity.