Probably the money that FB "generates" is literally insane, and doesn't make sense for a single company to generate.
Possibly a mastodon based solution where users pay a small recurring fee for server management and some R&D and offering privacy, could generate enough benefits for a company (or companies) to strive.
FB (among others) made us forget the sense of scale and the value of things, including the value of privacy and brain time. I would rather pay today from 1 to 5 USD a month for a service that works, where I can share my kid's pictures with my direct family and only them, with no ads.
If people aren’t willing to
pay for it, its either a social service or it shouldn’t exist. Facebook continued existence is subsidized by extremely lax regulation in the advertising industry.
At one point it was estimated that Facebook gets $40/month in advertising per US user - how do you then reconcile that with you only being willing to pay $1-5?
I make a difference between what FB customers pay for promises of brain time, and what the service FB provides actually is worth for _me_ (people are no customers of FB).
$40/month/user might be what FB get from their customers. It does not mean that it is the value it is actually providing to its own end users (excluding ad afficionados if that exists).
There is also a difference with what it actually costs to provide the useful part of the service. Mastodon is open source, yes it requires hardware (virtual or actual) and operation, none of which is free, but the cost of these certainly doesn't match the cost of running+developing game changing (advertisment/recommendation) ML models and ultra high scale infrastructure. Running a mastodon server for a thousand users with acceptable availability, and no fancy ML or R&D, I think should be doable for $5.000 a month, yes.
