Meta's death (if it happened), will be a slow and a long one. Like Oracle or IBM (although IBM is not completely dead). Given the JS ecosystem cycle, React will be replaced by something better much sooner.
The JS ecosystem cycle has slowed way down. React is 9 years old now. Vue is 8 years old. Svelte, the new kid on the block, is 5 years old.
If React is halfway dead, and I doubt that given how much $$ is being invested in new React apps today, then that is still another 9 years of React.
I do agree that Meta will be around for longer than 9 years though! :)
The other thing people don't realize is that React Native is huge. It has been ported all over the place, the basic idea of "universal UI primitives that you write native backings for" is a pretty good one, and JSX is a really nice templating language.
I'm not a fan of quite a few things about React, but its design is solid enough that it isn't going anywhere.
Exactly, there's no way Meta will suddenly disappear and go poof, barring some kind of extreme government action or bizarre corpora-cidal action by its controlling shareholder Mark Zuckerberg.
Nothing popular becomes unfashionable that quickly.
Advertising revenue is obviously more fragile, but I don't think Facebook cresting the high water mark says all that much about the tail trajectory.
There's no site on the planet other than Facebook that lets me interact with my entire family all at once in a way that I know will reach them.
AOL tried to be all things to internet users and wanted to be a walled garden at a time when cheaper alternatives were coming out that gave users more freedom. Facebook is resigned to the fact that it isn't a walled garden, but it does things to try to retain and gain new customers anyway.
My kid’s class parent’s group is a Facebook group. In other places it’s a WhatsApp group. The only reason is everybody has a Facebook account.
I have one too, I just don’t log in anymore, so I have no idea what the other parents are talking about behind the scenes. This is the tyranny of a walled garden social network.
I’d welcome Meta crash and burn tomorrow.
Personally, somewhere on my project backlog is a plan to set up a personal Matrix server for this exact reason, as most of the public ones I've found stop just short of actually supporting bridging for any Meta platforms yet.
(And even if they did, E2E bridging is still WIP at the spec level anyway if memory serves, which would mean still having to roll my own for the time being... Because naturally, if I'm concerned enough about my dependence on other people's cloud services, or their harvesting of my data, to consider going to lengths like these, then I'm obviously not just going to just wantonly funnel a collection of DMs spanning about half my lifetime through a third party's servers.)