Before the CIA got involved with Facebook, it was already popular, just not mass surveillance level of popular.

I never got the whole appeal of sharing personal experiences like pictures through a corporation. The popularity of Facebook only signals to me how incredibly stupid and shallow the average person is. Kind of similar to Reddit in a way, which has no values left from when it was founded; it was fun to be on Reddit, until it became the Chinese misery it is today.

Social media is essentially dead already, because there is no way to figure out what's real and what's fake anymore in the long term; imagine that twenty million trolls have an AI PC in five years with locally running LLMs. There's no way to filter that spam.

If you have real friends, you would actually visit them and show them your vacation pictures on your phone or hook them up to some projector or better yet: take them on said vacation. Shared experiences have value, some shitty picture of you near some place where millions of tourists visit every year is completely worthless.