I find the idea of Facebook being "necessary" for anyone quite spectacularly laughable. This isn't, air or water. You can live without it, and many people happily do. Facebook is about as essential as essential oils.
I am not so sure about candidates for public offices, though. Especially in majority voting systems. Not having a social network presence may be crippling for their electability.
* It can still be bridged to Matrix, ensuring you don't have to use Telegram if you don't want to
* There are open-source Telegram clients (at least for Android)
* It doesn't sound like too much more effort: One extra message weekly (for sales), and one extra message daily (truck location)
* Using one doesn't preclude you from using the other - you don't reduce his exposure or sales, and help him reach customers who hate FB as much as your Snap-On dealer.
* It reduces everyone's dependence on Facebook
All that said, my Snap-On dealer just has his cell number available, and follows a predictable route - we know he stops by every other Monday, and we can text him if we need something swapped out. It works for us, but I won't pretend to know your guys business better than him.
Also, the Facebook story isn't finished yet. Is it really that far-fetched to believe that their influence over our lives could 10x over the next 50 years? I hope it won't, but I wouldn't be willing to put my money on it. So keeping in mind that the context of this thread is about getting permanently banned on Facebook, for anyone who thinks that might have zero impact on them, I would suggest you still keep a foot in the door in case you change your mind down the road.
Just because something isn't strictly necessary doesn't mean that life can't become difficult without it. The sad fact of the matter is that by cutting off Facebook you're also cutting off the primary way of staying in touch with some people along with things like events and so on. Yes there are workarounds, of course there is but the vast majority of people don't care and can't be convinced to care about the politics and social effects of Facebook's dominant position.
I'm strongly passionate about rock climbing, and try to structure my life around it as my primary form of recreation. If I'm traveling for leisure, climbing is a big part of the agenda. There are many communities for finding people to climb with on Facebook, and I've used them extensively.
Without facebook, I'd more often have to resort to self-belaying, which is much more dangerous (among other reasons, if you're knocked unconscious there's no one to start a rescue or call for help). Having access to the various regional climbing groups on facebook has put me in touch with so many people, so I have only had to do that on a handful of occasions.
There are other examples I can think of, even if none of them have been so drastic. But without access to Facebook, many people would have their lives seriously impacted, and possible lack of access to life-saving resources.
The only one that comes to mind (and that annoyed me the other day) is ProductHunt, which has 4 options for signup, but not email.
Also as a buyer, I have to use my mother or friend Facebook account to find items or contact sellers.
Facebook may not be necessary, but there is a very high probability it is the only social medium that the majority of your acquaintances & relatives use.
Being forcibly disconnected from humanity is extremely isolating & harsh.
It's not like leaving Facebook turns you into a hermit. If it does, then maybe it's time to find a new group of friends.
Even if I did have contact info for a thousand people & kept a schedule, maintained contact on a 1:1 basis, took the time to inform myself of people's lives, isn't it a bit rude & disrespectful, an ineffective use of other people's time, to make them recount toe personally what's going on, what's happened to them? Literally call them up & ask them to repeat the events of their social media deed for the past month? Oh and read me peoplecs tries too. Who "loved" that status update? Can you send those pictures? The asks, the wastes of time, to get anything resbling the faintest hint of parity, are practically endless.
This is just blindingly blaringly obviously unacceptable in every way. Facebook's monopoly on mainstream people-you-know social media has ipso facto come to be humanities warm glow, the fire we gather by. Getting dropped out of the exchanges & chatter of humanity is a cruel & bitter fate, a shocking act.
Your poo-poo'ing dismissal of access to the locked-on standard of sharing life events & baby photos seems so heartless to me. You don't seem to be willing to budge, to show an iota of sympathy for people's use, any willingness to acknowledge that this monopoly of broadcast human connection (& replies) is such an overwhelming monopoly because it works, because it has suceeded, because it is efficient & useful. It is that way because everyone is there. It's won because it came out on top, because metcalf's rule is true; the value of a network is (exponentially at first, sigmoiding eventually to 1, a fully connected universe) proportional to the amount of nodes and connections on it.
Being denied the ability to not only write but to read too to the world's one and only mass human network is unbearably cruel. You should show some sympathy. I agree that life can be pretty good without it, that we can cut loose a lot of the ambient connections we otherwise would never keep. But that ability to connect, to humanize at such a massively larger scale than was possible before is, to me, absolute magical & I love those who do use it well.
I just wish it wasn't a monopoly, mostly. This connectivity is too vital, too good to be Facebook's & Facebook's alone.