If you're deleting Facebook and not getting rid of messenger you're missing the point. Messenger is more invasive in many ways, even if it doesn't track your web activity as much.
Invasiveness of Messenger is much more bearable because it lets me communicate with my Facebook friends, which I see as much more important benefit compared to a time sink newsfeed.
Also, using Messenger Lite (Android only) is a vastly better experience than the main Messenger app.
It's funny, because for me the primary benefit of Facebook is events. Keeping track of events with calendar invites is much more clunky and higher friction. Messenger is just walled-garden email and I could live without it, but I have no idea how to do community events as well as I can with Facebook.
And it's funny because contrary to the "Facebook as hypnotist" narrative (which is real) Facebook is a really fantastic tool for getting people together talking face to face and even working together on things.
Until you realize that FB has no API to get events out of FB. FB might be useful but it's the same usefulness as having an email thread with a calendar invite. They don't let you export your event data in any meaningful way to keep you on the platform.
It's not just about events automatically appearing. First of all, I'm not sure of a way to do that without individually exporting events, maybe if I setup FB emails for events, I could get GMail to auto-add them, but I don't use GMail so it would take more setup to ingest invites automatically. But even then, there's no way to RSVP inside the calendar invite itself. The interface is opaque, they let you read their data, but not interact with it in a programmatic way despite it being _your_ friend network and _your_ event.
It just depends on what you use it for. A lot of my friends have cheap phone plans with low network minutes/texts but unlimited wifi. Facebook Messenger becomes a cheap phone in this case. There's alternatives, but I'd have to convince everyone I know to swap to them...not gonna happen.
Meetup.com maybe? But I agree, I use Facebook Events a lot. It comes back to that issue of "everyone is here and using it, so this is where events are posted".
If Facebook decides you should be allowed to talk face to face and work together, that is. One of the big problems with Facebook events is that the algorithm filters them out pretty aggressively unless the creator pays to promote them.
SlimSocial also supports Messenger and is a good alternative to the Facebook app in general. You still have the same privacy issues regarding data on Facebook's servers, but at least this app lacks the client-side analytics.
I also use messenger to communicate with friends, but i think im going to make the effort to convince them to move to a privacy focused and non data mining platform, such as telegram.
The thing you are missing is that many of us have friends all over the world. And international SMS quickly gets expensive. (Also, most people are not on signal / your-favorite-messaging-app) ...
To give my personal answer for it, there's no other cross-platform messaging service that everyone uses.
There are other chat services sure, but the Facebook has by far the most number of people I know on it. Also, not everyone I know exchange numbers. There's no usernames, etc on Facebook so its easy to find people too.
Weird, I know, but guess generations are changing. Apparently now Snapchat has become the main form of 'communication' for many millennial with their friends. So looks like I'm falling behind.
Because SMS only supports text, but not any form of multimedia. Granted you can use MMS but that's really expensive and only does photo and video. Also, SMS has no encryption or sender authentication, not even any way to prevent MITM sniffing or spoofing (which is why online banking SMS verification is unsafe as hell).
If I have messenger (edit: Messenger Lite) on my phone, is it tracking my location the same as the facebook app would? I usually have location services turned off but I don't imagine that makes much difference.
