Facebook (thefacebook.com → facebook.com, 2004)

Facebook is the founding product-instance of the Meta Platforms social-media complex — the canonical DM-Day algorithmic-social-graph and behavioral-advertising machine. Launched 2004-02-04 as thefacebook.com at Harvard by Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin; initially gated to Harvard students, expanded via invitation to Ivy League + US universities by mid-2004 (the college-network gating mechanic was load-bearing: scarcity enforced real-identity norms and seeded high-status early adopters). Open registration: September 2006. News Feed launched 2006 — the algorithmically-ranked social stream that became the core product and was deeply controversial at launch (600,000 users joined a "Students Against Facebook News Feed" group within 24 hours; Zuckerberg did not roll back). Mobile-first pivot: 2012, coinciding with the IPO (May 2012: $38/share, $16B raised, $104B market cap — largest US tech IPO to that date). Cambridge Analytica scandal March 2018 (~87M users' data harvested without consent via quiz app; Aleksandr Kogan / SCL / Trump 2016 campaign); precipitated Senate and House hearings April 2018 and Global Data Protection regulatory wave. Libra cryptocurrency project announced June 2019 → renamed Diem 2020 → wound down January 2022 after central-bank regulatory resistance globally. Meta rebrand October 2021 (metaverse pivot); metaverse investment peak $13.7B Reality Labs losses (2022), faded by 2023. AI pivot: Llama-1 February 2023; Llama-3 April 2024; Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses 2023. Peak active users: ~3.07B monthly active users (Facebook blue app alone, Q3 2023); Family of Apps daily active people: 3.3B (2024). Declining youth engagement in core Facebook product (US 13-34 cohort shifted to Instagram + TikTok by 2018-2020; Facebook blue app increasingly 35+ demographic by 2024). FTC v. Meta antitrust trial 2024-2025 (seeking structural divestiture of Instagram and WhatsApp). This instance card captures the Facebook product arc and founding origin story; the class card (machine:meta-social-media-platform-2004) carries the corporate/platform-class trajectory. V2.5 GAP: motor=flywheel describes the two-sided network effect; the algorithmic-feed- driven content emergence subtype (EmergenceSubtype §11.43) has no top-level Machine field in schema v0.1 — recorded in description: emergence_subtype= algorithmic_feed_network_effect (custom subtype pending V2.5 schema extension). Intra-era couplings: parent class Meta, sibling Instagram (acquired 2012), sibling WhatsApp (acquired 2014), competitor ByteDance/TikTok, regulatory apparatus EU-GDPR. Cross-era: sublimation → MM newspaper-broadcast (news-OPP rendered irrelevant by personalized feed ~2012); zombie_dependency → MM national-electrical-grid (datacenter power substrate); parasitic_extraction → MM newspaper-broadcast (news-content extraction without sustaining newsroom labor); adapted_inheritance → LM fediverse-protocol-collective (ActivityPub/Threads integration as hedge against fediverse displacement).