To me, Facebook is just another BBS that has pushed past its prime and is overloading me with candy (cough ANSI graphics, boo! cough) in order to keep me connected - its an age-old formula, and while the density of information being pushed is orders of magnitude greater than it was back in the 1200bps day, the mechanics are still the same.
So what was old is new again.
And just like the BBS era, we seem to be fitting on a curve where the potential for disruption is very real.
What I perceived happen to the Golden BBS Age is, the users grew up. They became a bit more technically competent. They learned to use other tools ("Winsock, TCP/IP") that - at first, were quite daunting - but once mastered, gave them wider access to a far broader range of information sources - the Internet.
So perhaps there is some of this factor occurring here, too. People are tired of the man-behind-the-curtain technological manipulation of Facebook and its related services, just like we tired of tyrannical BBS ops booting us for wrong reasons back in the day.
So, where will the sophisticated new, liberating technology come in? Like, back in the end-of-BBS days, there were a lot of tool vendors selling shovels and pick axes along the road - the "Winsock for Dummies" and "Easy TCP/IP" products that made BBS'es irrelevant.
Is it IPFS? Is it Mastodon?
I believe, if there is hope, it lies in the OS vendors.
Just like these additional services eventually became integrated (nobody needs to install a TCP/IP stack any more - you've already got one), social networking needs to become a feature of the OS.
Trouble is, the OS vendors have been mostly asleep at the wheel for too long, having been lured into walled gardens themselves.
But, if there is hope, its in the eventual integration of advanced technologies into the default, out of the box, OS stack, such that there is no need for a centralised monopoly of subversion any longer. Imagine if Microsoft or Apple decided to nuke the scene, and add IPFS and Mastodon tech to the default stack. This would wipe Facebook out in a matter of months - just like happened to BBS's when the Internet finally got the tools from smart vendors that were needed to make intelligent Users again...