7 ms·

Ask HN: If Meta dies will React follow?

34 points by friendlydog 5y ago

What happens to React if Meta disappears? Will it limp along or is it disconnected enough to continue improving without Facebook Meta?

AlwaysRock 5y ago
If Meta dies the economy will follow. Meta isnt going anywhere. If Oracle is employees massive amount of people Meta will for a long time to come. Look past one quarters earning reports.
- willturman 5y ago
  > If Meta dies the economy will follow Can you expand on this? I see a company that produces net-negative societal value going through a process of price discovery. Facebook/Meta offer nothing beyond a shrinking user base to advertisers.
  - ReaLNero 5y ago
    A firm can be net-negative in societal value, while profitable in the value it captures. E.g. oil companies
- adventured 5y ago
  The US economy would barely notice if Facebook vanished over the course of the next few years. It's a modest blip in the $23 trillion US economy and its economic presence would be absorbed by others relatively quickly. Other platforms would gobble up their ad dollars, other platforms would be born or step in to pick up the eyeball attention. Other marketplaces would absorb their local listings. Ten years out people would barely remember Facebook ever mattered at all. It'd be like a 45 year old remembering the dominance of Atari in their youth, or IBM ruling over the PC industry for 15 minutes, or AOL's good ten year run in the early days of the consumer Internet. Nobody really gives a shit about eg Instagram or TikTok. They don't really matter. Oh a trinket vanished, here comes the next trinket. The world didn't stop with AOL, MySpace, Flickr, Friendster, ICQ, AIM, Geocities and 327 other services that nobody cares about today; and it won't stop whenever Facebook gets around to dying (regardless of the difference in scale, that doesn't matter much per capita - you don't have 3,000 friends on Facebook in reality, you have 13). People care more about sitcoms than they do these toy services, and their beloved sitcoms go away all the time, replaced by the next distraction device. Most or all of these social networks will rot and die eventually, who cares. On with the next. And I say that as someone entirely without any of the comical rage that most of HN has regarding Facebook. It's simply obvious Facebook isn't that important.
  - AlwaysRock 5y ago
    It's pretty incredible to think that a near trillion dollar company could go away and nothing would happen.
nightski 5y ago
Look through your javascript dependencies. Is react really at the top of your list for worries of death? hah.
tiernano 5y ago
I don't think "Meta" will die, but "Facebook" might... Meta being the parent company, Facebook being a sub company... As long as Meta keeps something running (I am going to guess that Facebook Infrastructure might be spun out and used as a separate entity) they may have other stuff as a post Facebook project... This whole "Metaverse" thing is one of those that might end up replacing Facebook... then again, both could die and something else takes over... [Edit] Doesn't directly answer your question... but if internal dev still need React, they will keep it around...
- jstx1 5y ago
  Facebook still has billions of users. It's a very very long way from losing users for the first time or losing stock value to dying altogether.
  - sleepybrett 5y ago
    It will certainly be a regional phenomenon. Facebook will become blocked and/or uncool in some country and it will spread. Also generational, the younger you are the more tolerance for constantly trying new things will be. I don't see my mid sixties mother ever abandoning her facebook quilting groups or her chats with her cousins, but her kids and her grandkids will eventually move on to something else. Just like AOL it will shamble on shedding engagement (user numbers can be juked and what constitutes an 'active user' in their shareholder reports will constantly be relaxed to prop up their egos) until one day it's a footnote.
emteycz 5y ago
React is used at so many of the F500 that it has no real danger of being abandoned by developers.
- vlunkr 5y ago
  Exactly, even if Meta vanished out of nowhere, react is open source. It's also not even that large of a codebase.
mikece 5y ago
In the event that Meta were to dissolve, liquidate their assets, and return the money to the shareholders, I suspect we would quickly see the establishment of the React Foundation or something akin to that under the mantle of some other open source software foundation. Either that or it will be forgotten like KnockoutJS was (and for the same reasons).
skinnymuch 5y ago
In the event something insane like that happens in this decade, then any thing could happen. No way to say any thing.
azangru 5y ago
React is the jQuery of the modern web. It's open-source; it's very popular; it won't die immediately if Meta were to fall; but maybe we will one day grow out of it.
jonathan-adly 5y ago
Meta's death (if it happened), will be a slow and a long one. Like Oracle or IBM (although IBM is not completely dead). Given the JS ecosystem cycle, React will be replaced by something better much sooner.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  There's nothing about Facebook that anyone needs, that no one else provides. It could go as quickly as AOL.
  - dasil003 5y ago
    Interesting reference point because I've heard AOL has continued to be a cash cow for decades: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266568/annual-revenue-of-aol/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266568/annual-revenue-of... Advertising revenue is obviously more fragile, but I don't think Facebook cresting the high water mark says all that much about the tail trajectory.
    - Mezzie 5y ago
      Can confirm; AOL is (sadly) still used. They're our fourth-largest mailbox provider by subscriber numbers.
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    Connectivity to your social circles is something Facebook provides that nobody else provides. There are other ways of connecting social circles, but due to network effects, they're all worse. There's no site on the planet other than Facebook that lets me interact with my entire family all at once in a way that I know will reach them.
    - sleepybrett 5y ago
      I'm not a facebook user but I did set up a google+ account while it was around and i did like that circles paradigm they had. For whatever else was wrong with that thing to make it crash and burn so hard and so quickly (other than google's corporate adhd and constantly being in 3rd or 4th place).. I did like that concept of circles as ways to target your content.
williamstein 5y ago
Vercel/nextjs.org is a nontrivial company whose business fundamentally depends on supporting the React ecosystem.
- brundolf 5y ago
  And they aren’t the only one. And countless other companies depend on React “non-fundamentally” at this point. React is Java now. At most it could start a gradual multi-decade decline (I don’t think this will happen, but it’s imaginable), but I’d bet consultants will still be getting paid to maintain/fix legacy React apps 40 years from now.
- cyral 5y ago
  They could (and probably should consider) going the Ionic route and building some generic layer that allows them to integrate with Angular, Vue, and future frontend frameworks.
- pier25 5y ago
  They seem to be slowly pivoting to Svelte though. Rich Harris is now working at Vercel. On the last Svelte Summit, Steph Dietz (a Vercel dev rel) literally said "Svelte is the future of web dev".
  - leerob 5y ago
    Hey, Lee from Vercel. We believe in both React and Svelte equally, and personally I'm also extremely excited about SvelteKit. Both React and Svelte can be successful, it's not a zero-sum game :)
- leerob 5y ago
  https://vercel.com/blog/supporting-the-future-of-react https://vercel.com/blog/supporting-the-future-of-react
parkingrift 5y ago
I belligerently hate Meta, but it's pretty wild to speculate that a company with 1.9 billion users will just up and die. A slow death on the order of 10-20 years may happen but I doubt React will still be popular by that time no matter what happens with Meta.
- chaosharmonic 5y ago
  Yeah, Meta will probably die like AOL, which is fitting since (at least in a rhetorical sense) it's also mostly lived like AOL.
- echelon 5y ago
  > A slow death on the order of 10-20 years may happen A sibling comment even said, > Meta's death (if it happened), will be a slow and a long one. Like Oracle or IBM (although IBM is not completely dead). I think death could happen a lot sooner. Rapidly, even. Meta is not B2B, but B2C. They won't have ten year contracts, legacy workloads that they can raise costs on, or new businesses to schmooze over a game of golfing with the execs. Social is fickle. MySpace and Digg died in an afternoon. All of the centuries of dead and forgotten stored content isn't keeping people there. It's connections. And those can come and go easily. Just look at Snapchat and TikTok. Meta employee compensation is going to begin decreasing both in terms of salary and stock equity. They won't be able to retain good talent, so initiatives will die. Meta is also in a narrative death spiral, and this will eat away at employee morale. New startups will see blood in the water. They'll come after the Baby Boomers. They'll come after the photographers. Facebook won't have capital to fight battles from every angle. They have a massive amount of infrastructure to maintain. This will become a giant thorn if they lose employees. How will they weigh keeping the lights on, finishing ongoing migrations, etc. vs fighting new battles to stay alive? We now realize how little moat they actually have. Facebook really needed a device. They tried to build a handset and failed. Oculus is too little too late. edit: Facebook ads will cost a lot less as advertisers demand more favorable rates and see diminishing value, perhaps even abandoning the platform for their ad spend.
  - parkingrift 5y ago
    Neither MySpace nor Digg were anywhere near the scale of Meta. At it’s peak MySpace was one or two orders of magnitude smaller than Meta is today. Facebook may wither and die but they also have Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. And for what it’s worth there is almost nothing more I’d like to see than Meta vanishing. I hope you’re right.
WorldMaker 5y ago
Microsoft's Office division has enough bets on React and React Native I'd be surprised if React didn't survive regardless of Meta.
diego 5y ago
Think of all the technologies that we use today that were invented at companies that no longer exist, or are no longer relevant. E.g. Java was invented at Sun, C at Bell Labs. Why would it be different?
have_faith 5y ago
Ideally a foundation of sorts would spin up to take over managing the project. There's more than enough companies with big pockets deeply invested in the React ecosystem.
samwillis 5y ago
I would usually argue that there is no way the Facebook/Meta would die (it almost certainly wont) and so the question is redundant. However because of the way Meta share ownership is structured Zuckerberg has complete control and the board/shareholders cannot eject him. Most (every?) other public company would go through multiple leadership changes over their lifetime as shareholders exert control. Zuckerberg seems to believe he is going to remain in total control forever, so who knows? Maybe one day the fact shareholders have no control will come back to bite him and the the share price will drop through the floor as confidence in him plumes to zero. Frankly maybe the last 48hours could be indicative of that. In most companies the board would have required the resignation of the CEO after the historically bad results yesterday. I suppose in some ways shares in Meta aren't really shares in Meta but shares in Zuckerberg himself.
- ryandvm 5y ago
  Fascinating. Looking forward to when Zuck hits his mid 40s and ends up self-immolating Meta in the most glorious mid-life crisis the world has ever seen. [Source: I'm in my 40s and could easily imagine cratering a trillion dollar company I created in a quixotic quest to make the world a better place.]
  - babyshake 5y ago
    Frankly, I think the whole Meta rebranding seems like a bit of a manic impulsive decision. Of course I know there is more to it than that but there's a not insignificant chance that it was the turning point in the company's decline, if the whole Oculus/metaverse thing doesn't in fact play out in the next couple years.
  - samwillis 5y ago
    You could be on to something there, "he" has just "rebranded" and asked us to refer to himself under a "cool" new name and new look. Plus he is trying to start the cult of the Metaverse where we will all transcend to a new plane of existence... this does sound a lot like a mid life crisis to me.
  - nostrademons 5y ago
antoniuschan99 5y ago
Interestingly we’re at the peak it seems. However none have shown any crazy adoption yet. Svelte seemed like it would be really popular but when pandemic hit I stopped hearing about it as much. Hopefully WASM will take over. Vue is as old as React and seems like it’s relegated to being in Reacts shadow
Tarucho 5y ago
It will limp along until it fades into dust, as it happens with all technology. Meta's fate is irrelevant.
tjpnz 5y ago
The JavaScript community will have moved onto something else when that time comes. It will still exist in the same way that YUI does (to some degree).
claudiulodro 5y ago
React is a core part of WordPress, which runs >40% of all sites on the internet, so that alone should be enough to keep it supported for the foreseeable future with or without Meta's engineers.
_fat_santa 5y ago
React has far too much investment from major companies to die. If something happened to Meta (metaverse doesn't work out and they are chopped up and sold off for parts), React would most likely be spun off into a Apache style foundation (ie. "The React Foundation")
kody 5y ago
We can only hope.
pier25 5y ago
Even if Meta died today, React is too big to fail at this point. I'm sure the React team would quickly find funding.
- brundolf 5y ago
  My bet: Microsoft would hire them wholesale. They’ve positioned themselves at the center of web development, they’ve embraced JS and React already, and yet they don’t have a front-end framework of their own because they missed the boat.
  - pier25 5y ago
    > they don’t have a front-end framework of their own because they missed the boat True, but they do have TypeScript though.
accountLost 5y ago
React health has already taken a hit with the introduction of hooks.
mikewarot 5y ago
What does a JavaScript library have to do with a second life clone effort by Facebook? The second life clone is going to fail. Facebook will go right on making profit. React is open source, and seems to have zero dependence on Facebook from my perspective.
remyduke 5y ago
don't take the adjustment in share price lead you to believe that something is fundamentally out of order with fb's businesses. they're still well positioned and are an essential service for many people worldwide. they seem to have been able to monetize fairly well, too. where do you get the idea that they are going to 'die?'
srgpqt 5y ago
You can already (and perhaps should) use preact today, a much better React clone. With 2 lines of webpack config, it can even be a complete drop-in replacement with no code changes.

34 points by friendlydog 5y ago

What happens to React if Meta disappears? Will it limp along or is it disconnected enough to continue improving without Facebook Meta?

AlwaysRock 5y ago

If Meta dies the economy will follow. Meta isnt going anywhere. If Oracle is employees massive amount of people Meta will for a long time to come. Look past one quarters earning reports.

willturman 5y ago
> If Meta dies the economy will follow Can you expand on this? I see a company that produces net-negative societal value going through a process of price discovery. Facebook/Meta offer nothing beyond a shrinking user base to advertisers.
- ReaLNero 5y ago
  A firm can be net-negative in societal value, while profitable in the value it captures. E.g. oil companies
adventured 5y ago
The US economy would barely notice if Facebook vanished over the course of the next few years. It's a modest blip in the $23 trillion US economy and its economic presence would be absorbed by others relatively quickly. Other platforms would gobble up their ad dollars, other platforms would be born or step in to pick up the eyeball attention. Other marketplaces would absorb their local listings. Ten years out people would barely remember Facebook ever mattered at all. It'd be like a 45 year old remembering the dominance of Atari in their youth, or IBM ruling over the PC industry for 15 minutes, or AOL's good ten year run in the early days of the consumer Internet. Nobody really gives a shit about eg Instagram or TikTok. They don't really matter. Oh a trinket vanished, here comes the next trinket. The world didn't stop with AOL, MySpace, Flickr, Friendster, ICQ, AIM, Geocities and 327 other services that nobody cares about today; and it won't stop whenever Facebook gets around to dying (regardless of the difference in scale, that doesn't matter much per capita - you don't have 3,000 friends on Facebook in reality, you have 13). People care more about sitcoms than they do these toy services, and their beloved sitcoms go away all the time, replaced by the next distraction device. Most or all of these social networks will rot and die eventually, who cares. On with the next. And I say that as someone entirely without any of the comical rage that most of HN has regarding Facebook. It's simply obvious Facebook isn't that important.
- AlwaysRock 5y ago
  It's pretty incredible to think that a near trillion dollar company could go away and nothing would happen.

nightski 5y ago

Look through your javascript dependencies. Is react really at the top of your list for worries of death? hah.

tiernano 5y ago

I don't think "Meta" will die, but "Facebook" might... Meta being the parent company, Facebook being a sub company... As long as Meta keeps something running (I am going to guess that Facebook Infrastructure might be spun out and used as a separate entity) they may have other stuff as a post Facebook project... This whole "Metaverse" thing is one of those that might end up replacing Facebook... then again, both could die and something else takes over... [Edit] Doesn't directly answer your question... but if internal dev still need React, they will keep it around...

jstx1 5y ago
Facebook still has billions of users. It's a very very long way from losing users for the first time or losing stock value to dying altogether.
- sleepybrett 5y ago
  It will certainly be a regional phenomenon. Facebook will become blocked and/or uncool in some country and it will spread. Also generational, the younger you are the more tolerance for constantly trying new things will be. I don't see my mid sixties mother ever abandoning her facebook quilting groups or her chats with her cousins, but her kids and her grandkids will eventually move on to something else. Just like AOL it will shamble on shedding engagement (user numbers can be juked and what constitutes an 'active user' in their shareholder reports will constantly be relaxed to prop up their egos) until one day it's a footnote.

emteycz 5y ago

React is used at so many of the F500 that it has no real danger of being abandoned by developers.

vlunkr 5y ago
Exactly, even if Meta vanished out of nowhere, react is open source. It's also not even that large of a codebase.

mikece 5y ago

In the event that Meta were to dissolve, liquidate their assets, and return the money to the shareholders, I suspect we would quickly see the establishment of the React Foundation or something akin to that under the mantle of some other open source software foundation. Either that or it will be forgotten like KnockoutJS was (and for the same reasons).

skinnymuch 5y ago

In the event something insane like that happens in this decade, then any thing could happen. No way to say any thing.

azangru 5y ago

React is the jQuery of the modern web. It's open-source; it's very popular; it won't die immediately if Meta were to fall; but maybe we will one day grow out of it.

jonathan-adly 5y ago

Meta's death (if it happened), will be a slow and a long one. Like Oracle or IBM (although IBM is not completely dead). Given the JS ecosystem cycle, React will be replaced by something better much sooner.

pessimizer 5y ago
There's nothing about Facebook that anyone needs, that no one else provides. It could go as quickly as AOL.
- dasil003 5y ago
  Interesting reference point because I've heard AOL has continued to be a cash cow for decades: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266568/annual-revenue-of-aol/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266568/annual-revenue-of... Advertising revenue is obviously more fragile, but I don't think Facebook cresting the high water mark says all that much about the tail trajectory.
  - Mezzie 5y ago
    Can confirm; AOL is (sadly) still used. They're our fourth-largest mailbox provider by subscriber numbers.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  Connectivity to your social circles is something Facebook provides that nobody else provides. There are other ways of connecting social circles, but due to network effects, they're all worse. There's no site on the planet other than Facebook that lets me interact with my entire family all at once in a way that I know will reach them.
  - sleepybrett 5y ago
    I'm not a facebook user but I did set up a google+ account while it was around and i did like that circles paradigm they had. For whatever else was wrong with that thing to make it crash and burn so hard and so quickly (other than google's corporate adhd and constantly being in 3rd or 4th place).. I did like that concept of circles as ways to target your content.

williamstein 5y ago

Vercel/nextjs.org is a nontrivial company whose business fundamentally depends on supporting the React ecosystem.

brundolf 5y ago
And they aren’t the only one. And countless other companies depend on React “non-fundamentally” at this point. React is Java now. At most it could start a gradual multi-decade decline (I don’t think this will happen, but it’s imaginable), but I’d bet consultants will still be getting paid to maintain/fix legacy React apps 40 years from now.
cyral 5y ago
They could (and probably should consider) going the Ionic route and building some generic layer that allows them to integrate with Angular, Vue, and future frontend frameworks.
pier25 5y ago
They seem to be slowly pivoting to Svelte though. Rich Harris is now working at Vercel. On the last Svelte Summit, Steph Dietz (a Vercel dev rel) literally said "Svelte is the future of web dev".
- leerob 5y ago
  Hey, Lee from Vercel. We believe in both React and Svelte equally, and personally I'm also extremely excited about SvelteKit. Both React and Svelte can be successful, it's not a zero-sum game :)
leerob 5y ago
https://vercel.com/blog/supporting-the-future-of-react https://vercel.com/blog/supporting-the-future-of-react

parkingrift 5y ago

I belligerently hate Meta, but it's pretty wild to speculate that a company with 1.9 billion users will just up and die. A slow death on the order of 10-20 years may happen but I doubt React will still be popular by that time no matter what happens with Meta.

chaosharmonic 5y ago
Yeah, Meta will probably die like AOL, which is fitting since (at least in a rhetorical sense) it's also mostly lived like AOL.
echelon 5y ago
> A slow death on the order of 10-20 years may happen A sibling comment even said, > Meta's death (if it happened), will be a slow and a long one. Like Oracle or IBM (although IBM is not completely dead). I think death could happen a lot sooner. Rapidly, even. Meta is not B2B, but B2C. They won't have ten year contracts, legacy workloads that they can raise costs on, or new businesses to schmooze over a game of golfing with the execs. Social is fickle. MySpace and Digg died in an afternoon. All of the centuries of dead and forgotten stored content isn't keeping people there. It's connections. And those can come and go easily. Just look at Snapchat and TikTok. Meta employee compensation is going to begin decreasing both in terms of salary and stock equity. They won't be able to retain good talent, so initiatives will die. Meta is also in a narrative death spiral, and this will eat away at employee morale. New startups will see blood in the water. They'll come after the Baby Boomers. They'll come after the photographers. Facebook won't have capital to fight battles from every angle. They have a massive amount of infrastructure to maintain. This will become a giant thorn if they lose employees. How will they weigh keeping the lights on, finishing ongoing migrations, etc. vs fighting new battles to stay alive? We now realize how little moat they actually have. Facebook really needed a device. They tried to build a handset and failed. Oculus is too little too late. edit: Facebook ads will cost a lot less as advertisers demand more favorable rates and see diminishing value, perhaps even abandoning the platform for their ad spend.
- parkingrift 5y ago
  Neither MySpace nor Digg were anywhere near the scale of Meta. At it’s peak MySpace was one or two orders of magnitude smaller than Meta is today. Facebook may wither and die but they also have Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. And for what it’s worth there is almost nothing more I’d like to see than Meta vanishing. I hope you’re right.

WorldMaker 5y ago

Microsoft's Office division has enough bets on React and React Native I'd be surprised if React didn't survive regardless of Meta.

diego 5y ago

Think of all the technologies that we use today that were invented at companies that no longer exist, or are no longer relevant. E.g. Java was invented at Sun, C at Bell Labs. Why would it be different?

have_faith 5y ago

Ideally a foundation of sorts would spin up to take over managing the project. There's more than enough companies with big pockets deeply invested in the React ecosystem.

samwillis 5y ago

I would usually argue that there is no way the Facebook/Meta would die (it almost certainly wont) and so the question is redundant. However because of the way Meta share ownership is structured Zuckerberg has complete control and the board/shareholders cannot eject him. Most (every?) other public company would go through multiple leadership changes over their lifetime as shareholders exert control. Zuckerberg seems to believe he is going to remain in total control forever, so who knows? Maybe one day the fact shareholders have no control will come back to bite him and the the share price will drop through the floor as confidence in him plumes to zero. Frankly maybe the last 48hours could be indicative of that. In most companies the board would have required the resignation of the CEO after the historically bad results yesterday. I suppose in some ways shares in Meta aren't really shares in Meta but shares in Zuckerberg himself.

ryandvm 5y ago
Fascinating. Looking forward to when Zuck hits his mid 40s and ends up self-immolating Meta in the most glorious mid-life crisis the world has ever seen. [Source: I'm in my 40s and could easily imagine cratering a trillion dollar company I created in a quixotic quest to make the world a better place.]
- babyshake 5y ago
  Frankly, I think the whole Meta rebranding seems like a bit of a manic impulsive decision. Of course I know there is more to it than that but there's a not insignificant chance that it was the turning point in the company's decline, if the whole Oculus/metaverse thing doesn't in fact play out in the next couple years.
- samwillis 5y ago
  You could be on to something there, "he" has just "rebranded" and asked us to refer to himself under a "cool" new name and new look. Plus he is trying to start the cult of the Metaverse where we will all transcend to a new plane of existence... this does sound a lot like a mid life crisis to me.
- nostrademons 5y ago

antoniuschan99 5y ago

Interestingly we’re at the peak it seems. However none have shown any crazy adoption yet. Svelte seemed like it would be really popular but when pandemic hit I stopped hearing about it as much. Hopefully WASM will take over. Vue is as old as React and seems like it’s relegated to being in Reacts shadow

Tarucho 5y ago

It will limp along until it fades into dust, as it happens with all technology. Meta's fate is irrelevant.

tjpnz 5y ago

The JavaScript community will have moved onto something else when that time comes. It will still exist in the same way that YUI does (to some degree).

claudiulodro 5y ago

React is a core part of WordPress, which runs >40% of all sites on the internet, so that alone should be enough to keep it supported for the foreseeable future with or without Meta's engineers.

_fat_santa 5y ago

React has far too much investment from major companies to die. If something happened to Meta (metaverse doesn't work out and they are chopped up and sold off for parts), React would most likely be spun off into a Apache style foundation (ie. "The React Foundation")

kody 5y ago

We can only hope.

pier25 5y ago

Even if Meta died today, React is too big to fail at this point. I'm sure the React team would quickly find funding.

brundolf 5y ago
My bet: Microsoft would hire them wholesale. They’ve positioned themselves at the center of web development, they’ve embraced JS and React already, and yet they don’t have a front-end framework of their own because they missed the boat.
- pier25 5y ago
  > they don’t have a front-end framework of their own because they missed the boat True, but they do have TypeScript though.

accountLost 5y ago

React health has already taken a hit with the introduction of hooks.

mikewarot 5y ago

What does a JavaScript library have to do with a second life clone effort by Facebook? The second life clone is going to fail. Facebook will go right on making profit. React is open source, and seems to have zero dependence on Facebook from my perspective.

remyduke 5y ago

don't take the adjustment in share price lead you to believe that something is fundamentally out of order with fb's businesses. they're still well positioned and are an essential service for many people worldwide. they seem to have been able to monetize fairly well, too. where do you get the idea that they are going to 'die?'

srgpqt 5y ago

You can already (and perhaps should) use preact today, a much better React clone. With 2 lines of webpack config, it can even be a complete drop-in replacement with no code changes.