Good point, but some important aspects are missing. How ever I dislike Facebook for its aggressive adverts, for their privacy disasters, for their using algorithms - and by manipulating them for their own needs - I'm still in the network because - as you correctly mentioned it - I want to connect.

The thing is, I don't care about locations, I am not interested in my local periphery. I'm looking for kindred souls, sharing same interests like me all over the world. This is - alas - the quantity which counts... In Facebook I could find a lot of like-minded people, because it's just a huge population there. For example, I'm interested in earlier Dadaist movements in Japan of 1920ies. Facebook was only platform to find a lot of people with this interest. Even twitter wasn't really helpful.

So for me - the big picture is important. I hope one day we won't need Facebook or Meta, but will be able to connect to all people all over the world without privacy issues (like if users enable some specific interest for everybody to find them, proactively). This is the way I'd love to go (and finally to get rid of FB - now I still can't, since many of my contacts are using just FB and I will lose contact with them by exiting this privacy monster).