Yes, there are no silver bullets, and very likely no alternatives will achieve mass-adoption any time soon. But rather than a sudden collapse, we may instead expect a growing maturity of the alternatives that are being developed – one just needs to think about what was available e.g. 5–8 years ago versus now (Mastodon, ActivityPub, Signal, the many experiments in IndieWeb camp, etc.) to feel that enormous progress has been made, whilst FB’s violations of users’ freedom and dignity has, if anything, only gotten unashamedly much worse.
My main point regarding April Glaser’s piece on Slate–and more generally regarding the narrative of trustable and freedom-respecting alternatives being generally not ready for mass adoption–is that contrasting surveillance capitalism platforms to their alternatives based on usability and on apparent value for the general public is a dangerous, solutionist (in the sense of Morozov’s work) fallacy which should not be allowed to pass unquestioned.
Whether FB provides convenient features is fundamentally irrelevant until they can guarantee that their platform respects privacy and freedom (which will likely never happen, as surveillance/advertising is their business model). Implying that the use of FB and other platforms that violate users (and let users betray their friends and acquaintances) is acceptable because alternatives are supposedly not as convenient should be considered morally questionable, not taken as an argument open to debate.
Even besides the many software alternatives to FB’s “tools” (just to mention another one, the Discourse software which powers this and many other communities is way more civilised than FB’s discussion environment and, as a hosted platform, as convenient to use as FB’s tools), there are plenty of alternatives, from low-tech ones on which people have relied for decades or centuries to keep in touch, to just avoiding to do things that seem to require the use of surveillance platforms.
Calm Technology for one is a framework worth exploring and working within.