this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
357 points (94.1% liked)

Technology

84449 readers
3738 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Increasingly, Meta has been using debt to fuel its spending, amassing $59 billion in long-term debt on its balance sheet by the end of 2025, double the prior year’s total. And that doesn’t count the “aggressive” accounting it has used to keep the cost of a $27 billion Louisiana data center off its books. “The spending growth looks increasingly unsustainable,” The Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street” columnist Asa Fitch wrote this week.

Now, as the company careens from one staggeringly expensive misadventure to another, its cash-cow core business is starting to wear out. Last quarter, the number of daily active users across its properties declined for the first time to 3.56 billion from 3.58 billion.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Yliaster@lemmy.world 10 points 3 hours ago

3.58 to 3.56 billion isn't really significant because in the long term these sort of mega corporations can easily recover that many users.

But I like they're getting covered in debt, though idk how far it is from collapse as these numbers don't make much sense to me.

[–] melsaskca@lemmy.ca 35 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

When you speak of billions and trillions it's all meaningless bullshit and everything has gotten too far out of hand.

[–] etherphon@piefed.world 12 points 4 hours ago

Yeah, it's wild. I think these numbers are really literally making people into obsessive power hoarders like smaug. All this time and humanity has not yet learned it's not a great idea for any one person to have amassed such wealth and power.

[–] tehn00bi@lemmy.world 23 points 6 hours ago

That’s about 3 billion people too many.

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 37 points 8 hours ago

Company: grows 5% in a year instead of predicted 5.5%

Corporate media: It's dead.

[–] brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 13 points 7 hours ago

This is a nytimes article about meta reaching lemmy all frontpage. It's up to you whatever meta dies or not, stop upvoting their shit.

[–] dgriffith@aussie.zone 31 points 9 hours ago (5 children)

How

the FUCK

can a single datacentre cost

TWENTY SEVEN BILLION

dollars?

[–] ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world 38 points 8 hours ago

Well, you have the actual, physical cost of the datacenter -- the land, the design, the engineers, the permits, the environmental studies, the lawyers, the construction, etc -- and then you have the cost of removing roadblocks along the way. Especially in Louisiana, if you're not familiar with Huey Long: he's been gone for many decades, but his way of doing business down there hasn't changed a bit.

It's exactly like the East Wing ballroom: there's a private fund that Trump opened specifically for businessmen to contribute that will fund the ballroom construction, which has been open and taking donations since he tore the East Wing down, and there's also the bill before Congress, right now, that will have the ballroom paid for by tax dollars, all of it.

"But," you may ask, and rightly so, "why are private contributions needed to fund a ballroom that will be funded entirely by taxes?" and the answer to that is, "Yes."

One of the sure signs you're in a banana republic is that every palm must be greased on the way to getting legal consent for anything, no matter how small. The US is now no different.

[–] Stiggyman@ani.social 15 points 9 hours ago
[–] frightful5680@lemmy.world 4 points 7 hours ago

Gimme the money I'm going on a world home building and feeding tour. I'm mansa musa 2.0

[–] brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 2 points 7 hours ago

They have been keeping track of every website you visit for at last two decades

[–] anon_8675309@lemmy.world 2 points 7 hours ago

RAM prices bruh.

/s

[–] arsCynic@piefed.social 26 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Not dying fast enough. A list of good reasons to quit social media: https://www.arscyni.cc/file/quit_facebook.html.

[–] GreenBeanMachine@lemmy.world 45 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (3 children)

That would be nice. But it won't happen. Even if Zuck bankrupts it, some Elon will buy it and nazify it and keep going. All those sheep on insta and facebook are waay to valuable to let go.

[–] Jason2357@lemmy.ca 6 points 5 hours ago

Exactly. It is just a brand in a larger homogeneous surveillance capitalist social media landscape. If they "fail," the brand just gets absorbed into one of the others. If they "win," they absorb brands (like instagram).

[–] lechekaflan@lemmy.world 3 points 7 hours ago

some Elon will buy it and nazify it and keep going

Those Knickerbocker(?) twins and that four-eyes wanting to get even at Zuck.

[–] ilinamorato@lemmy.world 9 points 12 hours ago

It might not completely go away, but it will slide further and ever quicker into irrelevance. Just like Xwitter has done.

[–] Lanske@lemmy.world 13 points 10 hours ago

Left Meta (incl whatsapp) more then a year ago. Haven't missed it for a bit. Quite liberating actually, especially leaving whatsapp was great

[–] skisnow@lemmy.ca 21 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

There's only about eight billion humans in existence. 3.56B daily active users is as close to saturated as you can get.

[–] excral@feddit.org 3 points 4 hours ago

Is Meta even active in China or are they blocked by the CCP? If so you can remove 1.4 billion people from the list of potential users, meaning an even crazier market saturation

[–] Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 11 hours ago

Don't forget that a lot of them are bots

[–] Janx@piefed.social 22 points 12 hours ago

Like the billionaires currently ruining the world: please die faster.

[–] xylogx@lemmy.world 75 points 15 hours ago (6 children)

Bullshit:

Meta reported for its most recent quarter (Q1 2026, ended March 31, 2026):

  • Revenue: $56.3 billion
  • Net income (profit): $26.8 billion

That was up from:

  • $42.3 billion revenue a year earlier
  • $16.6 billion net income a year earlier
[–] tgf@lemmy.world 49 points 15 hours ago

When an aging business starts to take on water, the quickest, easiest — and most destructive — solution is to make moves that will generate more money now but may cost the company later. And that’s exactly what Meta has started to do. In the first three months of this year, the company started cramming more ads onto its platforms while charging advertisers more. Those choices may have allowed the company to increase its revenue per user by a significant 27 percent in the first quarter of 2026, but they are also likely to further alienate users (and annoy advertisers).

[–] lung@lemmy.world 30 points 15 hours ago

oh no they only have 3.5 billion users how will meta ever survive, their ability to take on debt must mean they are seen as unable to pay debts

[–] A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip 17 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

I believe the company is at the start of a long, slow decline ... if you look carefully, you can see chinks in the armor

Almost lyrical, free of palpable fact. Well, at least it's labeled "Opinion"

The latest earnings, released on April 29, revealed a dip in user numbers for the first time since it started reporting these figures.

This seems to be what got the author spinning their vision. I'll take it. Here's to hoping 🥂

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works 82 points 15 hours ago (8 children)

I've been spending a whole lot less time on Facebook recently, I've deleted the app off my phone, and just check in once a day or so on my computer.

They just don't seem to grasp that I want to see what my friends and family are doing, not meme pages.

[–] U7826391786239@piefed.zip 101 points 15 hours ago (10 children)

it's not that they "don't grasp" what you want, it's that they couldn't care less what you want

the way i was able to eventually delete my account was to sit down and delete everything i'd ever posted, every photo, every comment, etc. makes it easier to just say YES i want to remove this bullshit from my life altogether

load more comments (10 replies)
load more comments (7 replies)
[–] OldQWERTYbastard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 13 hours ago

I left Facebook after 18 years. It's nothing like what I originally signed up for.

Facebook is nothing but boomers, bots and AI generated click bait. A cesspool of our own creation.

Burn. It. All.

[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 29 points 14 hours ago (5 children)

What a stupid cope.

Meta is simply too big to fail, they can do whatever they like. Name a single big tech company that died in the last 20 years. Hell, even Oracle who make basically nothing of real value is doing incredibly well.

[–] jacksilver@lemmy.world 12 points 13 hours ago (4 children)

Yahoo and MySpace come to mind. Probably could count Nokia and Blackberry, although they were more phone/hardware.

Possibly AOL, but their "death" may have been more than 20 years ago.

And while technically some of those companies "exist" in some capacity today, I don't think we'd consider any of them except Yahoo as anything but a name/brand at this point.

[–] FrostyPolicy@suppo.fi 9 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Nokia is doing just fine. They're mostly focused on networking stuff nowadays. They left the phone business when MS bought it.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
[–] SunshineJogger@feddit.org 11 points 12 hours ago

At this point I wish for every mega Corp to die before they turn even more into tge cyberpunk dystopia visions of 80s movies.

[–] Mika@piefed.ca 6 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Declined from 3.58 billion to 3.56 billion, that's practically noting

[–] YetAnotherNerd@sopuli.xyz 2 points 6 hours ago

And that’s active users. Everybody has a shadow profile, whether or not you’re on Facebook, and they monetize that as well. Facebook.com itself could cease to exist, so long as the ad infrastructure remains able to track you and sell ads.

load more comments
view more: next ›