I don't care if Facebook is a monopoly -- they are an advertising business and their incentives are fundamentally misaligned to serve as a public institution. Even if they weren't a monopoly, if they were the darling of the world in terms of PR, they're still the wrong organization to serve public needs.

If people think we should have digital public spaces, then we should be paying for it as a public. We have parks and plazas where people can congregate, so why not government funded servers for hosting chat?