It is monstrously expensive by design, a deliberate choice as it chose to be a central intermediary point between as much people as possible to sell ads to make money. "your failed business model is not my problem".
Make the service based on p2p and the monstrously expensive maintenance bill is gone (along with the opportunity of being an intermediary and making piles of money with ads out of it)
Facebook makes no product, user provided data is their product and they sell it to advertisers. You got it right: facebook would disappear with advertising and exists only for the sole purpose of advertising.
It would be interesting to find out how much of this operational cost and complexity could be removed if they didn't depend on collecting as much data about users as possible for the purpose of targeted ads.
This is a complete non-answer. Where is Facebook supposed to get its revenue stream? It is monstrously expensive to maintain.
>Maybe when you start a company, focus on how to make a product instead of how to gather attention.
What kind of condescending crap is this? Getting attention is literally how they make money. It is their product. What product are they supposed to be focusing on to make money if not advertising?