There are certainly other paths the world could have taken where such power and control would not be in the hands of one company (and one person, really) but that's not what happened and it's worth lamenting if you believe the problem of "keeping friends connected through the internet" could have taken on radically different forms.

I am around your age, and my 10 year reunion had its own domain name and website (still up - not sure who is paying for it or hosting), but my most recent reunion (20 year) was only on Facebook, and since I have never had a Facebook account, I did not find out until about a week beforehand (second-hand from a friend who was not attending).

Please be aware, this is a cohort that has mostly been together since elementary/middle school, learned Logowriter together, and had an HTML CD-ROM yearbook.

Facebook has made everybody lazy and cheapened our relationships.

How does lack of domain and website cheapens relationships?

The domain was named to indicate it was reunion related.

If you couldn't find somebody's email address, you emailed their friend, or called them, and asked, "Do you know how I can get int touch with so and so...?"

YOU WOULD NEED TO COMMUNICATE WITH ANOTHER HUMAN TO OBTAIN INFORMATION.

But now, if it takes any effort to communicate with somebody, it doesn't happen.

Only the easy communication...and there is not much substance to it (bullshit small-talk or just posting links).

The "easy-ness" diminishes the quality of interaction.

Facebook is killing communication and friendship much less then 80 hours a week work schedule combined with long commute and with people changing jobs every 2 years on average. And maybe add to it nearly complete isolation after people have children. If any moment not spend with work or personal project is considered lazy, relationships have to go away.

For you, maybe. For me and others, it makes it easier to organize events and coordinate meetings with friends. Why do you assume your experience is universal? It might be a problem in your circle, but that doesn’t mean it is in everyone else’s.

I did that in part because i didn't want a repeat of the experience i had with LiveJournal as an undergraduate, where conversation and organisation that had been happening in university newsgroups suddenly evacuated to LJ and left me on my own.

(I don't think these moves were deliberate attempts to avoid me. I'm still good friends with all these people decades later, and they really would have found a way to shake me by now.)

Although this may apply to OP's problem(s), it's not really the case everywhere. I'll give you two counterexamples:

1) A friend of mine is required to have a facebook account for school (woodworking trade school). They say "you can always create one with a fake name" but that's obviously a TOS violation and may cause the account to be deleted at any time (making schoolwork really difficult).

2) My basketball group has decided to organize things on WhatsApp, again requiring you to accept FB's EULA. I refuse to do so, which results me in missing quite a few occasions to play and finding myself alone in the gym when practice has been called off.

Neither of these things were done on facebook in the past. Yes, it might be more convenient to do so (for the organizing party) but it'll leave a bunch of people out who refuse to sign carte blanche EULA for a company that preys on our personal information and influences our voting behavior.

Both of these cases are examples where email or phone would be acceptable, but it's (only) slightly more convenient to use social media for those who are a part of it.

Of the soccer team, basketball, and parenting groups I'm in; more and more of my peers probably couldn't even define a "calling tree". To them, there's no "alternative" to group coordination other than social media.

It's just easier to reach out on [X Technology] because they already friend-ed each other the first day of meeting. And FB makes that easy with location-based friend recommendations. Who even knows phone numbers anymore? (Emails next...)

I've stripped most of my personal information off Facebook and now just use it as a messaging app and a "find me by name" sort of internet yellow pages thing.

And your social graph. You implicitly give it information about all your interactions and connections - and allow it to record even interactions you aren't aware of (like other FB users looking you up or checking your profile without interacting with you in ways you find out about). You're also opting in to web-wide surveillance, where FB track you individually across every webpage with Facebook social widget on it (unless you take steps to manage your browser's FB login status - and most likely even if you do log out whenever you're done with FB by using "industry standard" ad network browser fingerprinting...)

I’ve had friends have to submit government ID to prove that they were using their real name.

The problem is, that after you sign up and enter only your e-mail address, Facebook will fill in all the blanks for you, without needing any interaction from your side...

edit: cleaning up the grammar