Badly. Most non-techies I talk to would rather “find you on Facebook.”
This was largely behind the relative failure of RSS, in my opinion, even more than the Google Reader debacle. Various friends and family still ask me how I keep informed, I show them Reeder for iPad and they immediately want to get on board; then I explain how you go around to the news sources you like and gather feeds or use a bookmarklet and their eyes glaze over.
I hope this brainstorming on a distributed/federated social network goes somewhere, but if the creators don’t even bother considering why Facebook worked in the first place, their efforts are doomed.
3. People who want to share messages/data in groups (e.g. a local acting class)
4. People who want to follow events, share events, and follow which friends are going to what events.
Anyway, still horribly incomplete. Somebody should have put this list in the requirements, and put it up for discussion. System design starts with requirements!
Nobody is saying that, you're making a straw-man argument.
People are just saying that they have no interest in being part of a network that tracks their videos, location, actual name, phone number, text messages, behavior across the whole internet, email address, and builds a psychological profile on them in exchange to look up college buddies (and therefore have deleted their accounts).
Many of us want a network that errs to the side of too private, and it's okay if not everybody is on that network. Many of us would rather have no network as compared to one that's too public.