I read “it’s dying” by people on Discord and Reddit all the time, but the numbers prove otherwise. It’s been going up this entire time and sitting over 3 billion MONTHLY ACTIVE USERS!
I feel like the bubble around people on other platforms saying “who uses Facebook anymore lol” is kind of wild given the numbers. Keep in mind these are active users not just abandoned accounts.
It’s lazy and stupid to host your entire company’s online presence on a for-profit proprietary platform.
Another way to say the above would be “simple and easy”. Which is why it’s done by a lot of small businesses that don’t have the expertise (or the funds to hire expertise) to do something better
If it’s a small town hardware store, it’s easier for them to manage a Facebook page that they can access using their regular Facebook account.
Good luck to them when Facebook starts throttling their views and demanding money for more exposure. And good luck to them since they don’t show up on Google or yellow pages sites, nor have a website listed on Google maps. Like the other person said above, plenty of people will just do business elsewhere.
Instead of just doing W analysis, why don’t you learn SWOT analysis instead. It will water down your bias.
Businesses are in the business of running their business, not worrying about FOSS principles and the open web. They can set up a quick information front without having to pay for a webmaster, hosting space, server space, an ISP to handle all that traffic, etc. So why would they care or want to spend the effort otherwise at their size?
I addressed the question in your last sentence here:
https://lemmy.world/comment/8818297
What part of “they don’t care” are you having trouble wrapping your head around? They’ll either live with it, or move to another platform that’s easy to use.
IT is not a core competency of most businesses and their goal is to minimize time to deploy and effort on parts that are not core to their business. If it means spending slightly more then so be it. It’s the “build or buy” problem and since IT isn’t their thing, “buy at the cheapest price possible” is gonna win every time.
Most small business need all the business they can get. But if they don’t care, then that is on them.
How often do you look at the website of a restaurant before going to it? If they don’t have a website and instead just a Google maps page does that stop you?
Quite often.
Fair enough
This is real funny because you can get throttled by big corporations even if (or rather especially if) you’re self hosting pretty much the same way
I have never once had one of my websites throttled, and I’ve been building websites for 20 years.