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Comment by keewee7 | Hacker News Reader

Facebook has become the local town square on the Internet. Thousands of active local groups is something that other social networks will have a hard time replicating. Marketplace is another feature that takes advantage of Facebook having a strong local presence, everywhere.

Why did they pivot towards VR and metaverse when Facebook's strength is being the "Localverse"?

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No they aren't. Because of [censored] algorithmic timeline you only see posts Facebook decided are relevant for you, and usually they aren't the ones you are most interested to see.

They are indeed investing into groups, but ultimately the marginal gain there is marginal. The metaverse stuff also complements (i.e. it isn't a complete pivoting away from traditional social networking) all of the other connectivity (e.g. imagine a unique and persistent VRChat instance per group; you can have a meta-localverse) but also gives Meta its own platform. Mark is obviously incredibly pissed at the amount of leverage Apple has over him.

Because FB missed owning the smartphone platform with their FB phone (apple + google), and so they want to own the next one in their opinion (VR-Oculus).

They do own WhatsApp though.

The Localverse isn't defendable in anyway. People don't use Facebook pages/groups because it's "Facebook". They use it because it's adjacent to something else they do.

I think Reddit is probably the local town square, but it depends on your bubble.

Marketplace is there, Messenger, but I haven't used FB for anything else in years.

They filled the town square, and growth is the primary metric, so they decided to announce a new and exciting area to grow in.

So was Yahoo Groups at one time.

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