Before FB, there were niche, interesting, though a bit more local - language barriers - communities around interesting topics. Most of them dried or died out sp

Before FB, there were niche, interesting, though a bit more local - language barriers - communities around interesting topics. Most of them dried or died out specifically because of Facebook - I can point at quite a lot of Hungarian forums and community sites that went silent around 2009-2010. UX wise Facebook groups are abysmal compared to old style forums: they are very hard to search, to follow threads, everything is thrown in at one pile of things where something "magical" decides priority, and most comments are hidden behind "more...". It also has fairly strict policy on acceptable topics. Apart from all those problems, I also have the issue with FB is all-on-one. I firmly believe that most Europeans have work (colleagues and/or professional life), outside of work (family, generic friends), and private personas (very close friends, spouse, etc) - I don't know about the rest of the world. FB wants to merge these. I have no desire to accidentally mix my private persona with my professional one in case I forgot to set a post on a niche community private, or because FB suddenly changed something and reset the setting. This also applies for the visuals: everything looks the same. I want my communities/niches to look different. Cyberpunk doesn't go well with black text on white background. I think you're on the right track with the mall parallel, but it may go even further: social media is high street stores. And it's killing specialist business.