Wikipedia runs on donations. Most of FB is a massively bloated interface to maximize engagement, shove as much “content” as they can anywhere and everywhere, track everything you do, and add more “features” to find the next mechanism to get people more addicted.

For over a decade, I used Facebook lite messenger app which was built for countries with spotty, slow internet. It was less than a tenth of the size of the US messenger (of course it was unavailable in the app store and had to be installed via apk), was fast and easy to use (no stories, feeds, money sharing, animations), and was much better at doing the one thing it was supposed to be for, messaging people. It finally stopped working a couple of years ago and the regular app is a bloated mess where chats are an afterthought.

And why? Ads. You need more engagement so you can show people more ads. You need more content, so you have more things to attach ads to. You to autoplay videos to get people to watch more and see more ads. You have to run trackers so you can better target your ads. It’s the ads, not the functions, that make the modern internet too expensive to be funded by individuals.

2000s Facebook was able to run just fine on 2000s internet and storage. It would take a trivial amount of modern data and a fraction of modern storage to run now.