I wonder if there's a market for something in-between. A Facebook-alike service with no apps, no advertising and nothing but posts containing original content (no 'share').
i prefer to have a private jabber/OTR chatroom open with a bunch of friends in it to talk to each other back and forth like a slow room IRC channel all day. privacy ftw so nobody ends up fired when going on a rant about a project, their company or relationships.
That would be ideal, but I doubt the US government would allow a private communication platform to operate on a large scale. Unless it was hosted outside of the states, it would be quickly backdoored for their benefit.
I've had ideas like that in the past (think Twitter crossed with GPG), but I think you'd struggle to get people adopting the platform.