If you cut me off tomorrow of Facebook and Messeneger I would instantly loose contact to the majority of people I care about (except my wife and parents).
I would end up spending life on my couch watching Netflix instead of engaging in a rich social life I have now thanks to FB events, groups, Messeneger, etc.
And I guarantee you that’s true for a large amount of the user base! Otherwise they wouldn’t retain.
(Fake) news and cat videos are a very hyped topic...but it’s really only a small part of why people actually use FB
And my partner being friends with my mum on there has actually helped both out with subsequent interactions as they know more about their common ground.
Facebook, ultimately, is what you make it. There's loads of "racist uncles", "fake news", "Tasty videos" etc, but if you engage with the people, it's as powerful as ever.
Culture has always changed with time.
Far from many of my friends and family? Many of them live in other states or countries, and Facebook is cheaper and usefully async when dealing with international calling rates and timezone differences, respectively. I'm not sure I understand your question.
Nearly every aspect of my social life is planned on Facebook. It's the one place where nearly everyone I know are. Facebook, for me, is really just the best event planning tool in existence.
I'd also instantly lose contact with a bunch of acquaintances and friends. I've moved around quite a bit in my life and Facebook connects me with those people. When I travel it's the platform I use to reach out to the people I want to catch-up with. It'd be a real bummer to lose that.
It's true that the news feed aspect of Facebook is something I wouldn't miss. It's something I never use anymore, politics has taken care of that. But all of the features around it ARE things I deeply care about.
My social life is on WhatsApp groups. No one in my social circle uses Facebook Messenger for anything relevant. The number of friends' photos has steadily gone down over the years. I've switched off FB but come back when am bored and want to spend time looking at cat photos and BuzzFeed. Facebook not existing in the world would impact me minimally.
Google, and even Microsoft, on the other hand, damn if they stopped existing... I'd be fairly distressed I suppose.
The Facebook website itself is no longer particularly useful to me, other than that it is very good at events (both private and for public event discovery). The groups feature is also handy.
This wouldn't work with the Facebook Messenger, since this social graph is not stored by the user.