I have decided to write down the reasoning behind me not (yet) closing my Facebook account. Which I really want to do, but feel like I cannot (yet).
My background: software developer.
What I use Facebook for: to keep up to date with family and friends.
In other words: I do not need “outside” people to see my posts. Not everything has to be shared with everyone for me.
I have noticed a lot of people opening up bluesky accounts “because it is not meta”, (which is a good thing, obviously).
The only issue is that the fediverse is a twitter (I refuse the name X) platform. Everything is public. On friendica, I can at least control who follows me, but I cannot determine who can see my posts.
So in my case, what happens is that some people might open a bsky/fediverse account, realize that everything is public and not use it again.
Why does the fediverse not have a privacy control to limit who can see and interact with your posts? While I do realize that with the Federation protocol everything is sort of public, this is the thing that keeps me from moving from fb to fediverse.
Edit: Holy crap guys, thank you for all the responses. The fediverse is aliiiive.
Too much to respond to, but:
1: yes i know fb is evil 2: as soon as the friend updates end, i stop scrolling. No desire to see all the stupid diy “tips”. 3: yes it sounds lame to use it to keep updated, but there is quite some distance between me and my friends and family 4: even if mastodon has the ability to not make posts public, every node admin can access the database. And I think that goes for every Federated platform, diaspora included.
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friendica, diaspora, and hubzilla all have groups/circles/aspects/whatever you wanna call it for post sharing privacy and are solid feature rich platforms in general
I was once a Facebook using programmer guy like you, then I
took an arrow to the kneedid some work for Meta and got a close up and personal look at their internal culture. It beyond pissed me off and creeped me out. I just couldn’t.Now, people have to text me to invite me to events and parties and stuff. I don’t know what’s going on with major chunks of my friends group half the time. I have to get my news and gossip the old fashioned way.
Before my Meta subcontractor experience, I spoke like you. But after, I don’t even miss it. Thinking about logging on to Facebook is like fingernails on a chalk board.
Thanks for sharing. Could you consider doing an AMA about your experience there?
You are in the denial phase of deleting your Facebook account.
This is the way
- marketplace
- messenger
Literally my only attachments to Meta at this point. I want to delete my account so badly.
I’ve heard that you can keep your account but delete your Facebook Profile
Same my friend, same… I’m on FB since 2008 or so as all my families and friends. For years now everyone gave up on it (I mean nobody is posting their vacation or food plate anymore) and the feed is mainly sponsored ads and far right stuff (In Canada there is no official news, only alternatives news).
But everyone are still using Messenger to talk, we have groups etc, and damn Marketplace is the thing here in Montreal, everyone is using it and it’s incredible to buy/sell, you need it or you will never buy/sell anything used.
I’m in the same boat, I want to ditch Meta, but Messenger/Marketplace has no alternatives.
Unfortunately, also, all the good old forums died off and people are using FB groups now, but it’s not as good
I never installed WhatsApp or Messenger on my mobile devices. I’ve found Signal is a good alternative, and increasingly people are adopting it… https://signal.org - it’s owned by a charitable foundation, not a mega corporation.
Also owned by Meta
For marketplace there is a project in development. It’s called Flohmarkt. Not quite ready yet for primetime but worth keeping an eye on
OfferUp, while not defederated, seems like a good option for a marketplace alternative for now.
Messenger can be replaced by signal, discord, or any other messaging type app.Messenger can be replaced by signal, discord, or any other messaging type app.
… Messenger can be replaced by what the person you’re trying to communicate with is willing to use. I’ve resisted using WhatsApp on my personal phone for years because I just don’t trust Meta products, but you have to have it in Costa Rica. It’s just a fact of life. Same with messenger in a lot of ways.
Why do you “have to use” whatsapp in costa rica? Other services don’t work there?
network effect
There are countries where every service has their official support on WhatsApp. I just booked a medical appointment via WhatsApp, it’s the preferred method of communication.
I think they’re saying the friends and family don’t understand or can’t/won’t figure out the alternatives. If you want to text them you have to use Messenger.
It’s sad, and familiar. All of my extended friends and family on Windows I just have to give them a sad look, like, “Aw. Poor thing.”
Oftentimes you can convince people to switch for one on one convos, but in a lot of places, all the group chats are on whatsapp, so like your alumni chat, your work group, your friend group, the group that was made for that event next week.
Those things are near impossible to change unless you are close to the organiser and they are willing to do you a big favour.
A couple things you may not have considered about Facebook.
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It’s horrible for keeping up with friends and family now. 95% of your feed is sponsored content crap that you didn’t agree to see, and can’t get rid of. Facebook does not want to show you what little content friends and family are still sharing.
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You are probably not as private as you think you are. Your account is private, but everything you say on other people’s posts who do not have a private account is public.
i have an extension that fixes the first one. it’s called fb purity. let’s you control what content is on your feed and how it’s displayed.
i don’t post to Facebook anymore, i just browse it to see what friends and family are posting. it still works quite well for that with this extension.
This was funnily what got me considering binning my account, (then Cambridge Analytica being in the news made it a thing I went through with).
I discovered that filtering out sponsored, friends-of-friends, shared posts, and sorting by most recent, there were 3 posts maximum each day written by someone I know! :) It made me realise how manipulative the site was, how frequently I “checked the fridge”, and how little I might actually miss. :)
Not the aims of fbpurity, but damn I’m happier since binning facebook :)
Ah, I have that on my desktop. It’s a pretty great plug-in. Unfortunately I haven’t found an equivalent for Firefox Android, and I do almost all of my browsing from my phone. I work from home at my desk for 8-10 hours per day, 5 days per week, so the last thing I want to do after I get off work is to sit at my desktop computer some more. Facebook is also pushing so much junk that it really decreased the amount of stuff people share, so it’s kind of a hollow shell of what it used to be. After you purge the sponsored content, there’s not much left. It really shows how fake the whole platform is now. Zuck is making billions of dollars pushing sponsored content to other content sponsors.
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Why does the fediverse not have a privacy control to limit who can see and interact with your posts?
Because of the way the protocol works.
There is no way to accomplish this is a publicly federated network without trusting the portals people use and/or creating some sort of public key exchange on friend requests.
This results in privacy breaches being as simple as compromising one node, or writing some code to make a node hostile.
The key idea would be basically when you friend/follow someone you send them your public key, they keep a list of keys and encode/individually send followed messages to people. Very onerous.
This.
The constant refrains of “Why won’t this public content sharing network bend over backwards to keep the things I share private?” shows a persistent misunderstanding of what’s going on here.
And also of how much privacy they actually have while using centralized social media. But that’s a whole other kettle of fish.
that’s a whole other kettle of fish
I will use that liberally from now on. An upvote from me.
Yes, people very much misunderstand thus stuff.
How do I upvote this post twice?
You can have multiple accounts, maybe on different instances, and you can upvote with all of them. A lot of clients allow easy account switching, e.g. in voyager if you tap on your username on the bottom bar twice, it opens an account selector dialog.
Doesn’t PixelFed allow marking accounts private though?
I don’t know what mechanism they use, but I have a hunch that if you allowlist one user from an instance, the instance owner could potentially see the stuff. Not just your own instance owner.
How are you (plural, I mean other posters too) managing to use Facebook to keep tabs on your friends? It’s so full of “sponsored”, “clips” and “ad” posts that it takes absurd amount of time to get to what people in your friends list posted. And it’s like 1 post from someone I know, 10 irrelevant trash
It does show the events (mainly concerts for me) other people are going to, so that’s why I do open it once in a few months
It’s mainly on facebook messenger for me. You’re right that it’s really hard to keep tabs on family/friends with a feed that’s full of stuff you’re not even following or subscribed to. So by “keeping tabs”, it’s actually just being able to keep in touch via messenger. Other than that, I use marketplace to sell stuff, but that’s it.
Ah, yeah. Messenger got so big that I’ve heard some users don’t even know it’s part of Facebook. They use it as separate app
I use “Feeds”. Click on the menu, then select Feeds, and then Friends. You will still get ads, but it is much better than the default feed.
Hm. I’ll have to take a look where to find it in SlimSocial. Thanks :)
Only on desktop an in popular browsers, though. I tried the Greasemonkey version but it didn’t seem to change much
I still use Facebook for family and friends. They aren’t going to switch and would sooner leave social media altogether.
I spend about five minutes or less a day on FB but I only check my friends feed. Aside from that, I don’t enjoy the majority of the content I see on FB and choose not to engage with it.
I’ve setup an automatic redirect from the FB start page to:
https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chrThis is the feed from followed people only - sorted by date, most recent first.
That’s the only sane way of using FB. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be a similar option in their mobile apps.
StopTheMadness on iOS allows redirects (and I’m sure other extensions do too) but it doesn’t actually take you to that page; it just directs back to the regular homepage.
Using the website (with an ad blocker) is marginally better than the app already. I hated the app in the past as I was convinced it was draining my battery unnecessarily…and it turns out that was a deliberate social experiment which filled me with rage.
Event listings is why I still use it, though. Friends, gigs, etc. I’ve tried to get friends to use Partiful instead at least but that doesn’t work well enough, and even that has issues.
On the mobile website, you have to go to the menu and select “Feeds”. However, there’s no direct link to it.
What I don’t like about using the mobile browser is that FB doesn’t behave like a PWA but opens as a normal webpage instead. Which means the cookies can be used to track the other pages I visit (that use FB login or other components from FB).
If I remember right, diaspora was kind of poised to be the fediverse facebook a very long time ago, one of it’s major features was aspects, which indeed was set where you added people to categories, and could make posts only visible to certain categories (basically if you remember google plus, that’s what they were copying). Though from what I’ve seen it took a huge PR hit very early on, but still is kind of alive last I checked.
Diaspora did not want to support ActivityPub: https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/7422
I’m roughly trying to skim to understand… of course both sides are over my head in development. But it sounds like the first thing they had was just lack of confidence they could do… well exactly what OP wants (IE specifically keeping posts private and only shared with who he wants). That combined with technical difficulty with limited development resources to rewrite the protocol itself.
Personally, as someone who hasn’t had a FB account for well over five years, it’s super weird to me that you need it to “keep up with family and friends”. You’re using a data harvesting, advertising, and propaganda platform to conduct personal communications. There was a time when this was done using nothing more than the United States Post Office and the telephone. So, we probably have the technology to keep in touch today while excluding Facebook.
In response to your concern with privacy controls: it’s not federated and I can only assume they’re being honest about privacy, you might consider looking at Vero. It has up-front tools to control who sees what.
Still, I would encourage people to minimize their reliance on any platform owned by someone else to maintain relationships. At someone point, something will break, will be hacked, will go out of business. Do you think Facebook will exist for 25 to 50 years from now? When it goes, all your photos and videos and conversations go with it. When someone dies, all the memories they’ve captured are gone. Hashtag: bring back photo albums.
This. I basically didn’t use my facebook for the last 6 years and i left it deactivated most of the time. My thinking was that people could use messenger to reach out to me (and my family has mostly been using messenger for stuff anyeay) but even then, that only proved true for a handful of circumstances, and the people who did make use of messenger or a non-deactivated account all had my phone number anyway.
Would my experience be different if I was more active on facebook? Eh, maybe. Maybe I’m an oddity, but most of my high school and college connections barely post on facebook as it is, if at all. I didn’t lose much by finally giving it the axe last week.
I think you bring up a good point about college and high school classmates. I don’t personally care about this but I imagine millions of others do. IMO, these groups should maintain their own social platforms. If you want to keep in touch with your classmates from Harvard, Harvard (or a private student counsel board) should maintain a forum for you.
Right - you want to post a picture of your kid for family, classmates, friends, coworkers to see all at once. Well, that’s (supposedly) where the fediverse comes in.
The fediverse, of what I know of it, is still lacking a lot of these tools that would be useful to people. People are pushing it really hard but it is not ready for the masses.
Fediverse by design is ideal for institution-based social networks for sure. Each school hosts a server and federates with the nearby institutions (possibly in a limited manner so it’s still focused on your group but you can easily interact with other people from your city)/school district too.
Maybe the school has two servers: one for active students, another for alumni. Some configuration for letting people say “only fill my main feed with stuff from my graduating class +/- 2 years” and so on. When you graduate, you get auto migrated to the next server.
Hometown sort of tries to do this for cities as a Nextdoor replacement (and even nextdoor for a long time tried to keep things hyper local with optional visibility elsewhere until they caved to ad money and NIMBYism)
I deleted it and have no regrets, I couldn’t even say what I want without hearing someone from my family and I don’t care what crazy shit my family has to say I don’t even like them
Make a group chat. Also, see my recent posts.
The main reasons I still haven’t closed Mine is that there are a couple niche groups I follow, local places that post daily status updates about things like ice fishing conditions that only exist there, and marketplace. I hate how Facebook hollowed out Craigslist.
Facebook Marketplace basically gutting Craigslist really blows. I can list something on Craigslist and not get a hit for a week but if I list it for the same price on marketplace I typically get a hit the same day as more people are over there now.
Personally I stopped using Facebook years ago, but I kept the account around for my grandma’s sake.
She has since stopped using the computer all together, so I took that opportunity to finally delete my account.I do still use Whatsapp though… I would prefer if I didn’t have to use it, but there is no real way around it in the Netherlands.
but there is no real way around it in the Netherlands.
The way around it is to force everyone to learn how to load Signal. If they can’t overcome this incredibly tiny step, you must excommunicate them from your life. It’s harsh, but to be fair, they had a 30 year head start and still can’t figure it out.
Most people won’t close their facebook account. if it ever does happen it will be because the accounts are purged (highly unlikely given facebooks raging hardon for data) or that the site undergoes a massive transformation after losing a ton of value and rebranding ala myspace.
That likely wouldn’t happen for many many years until a solid competitor arose that grew enough to overtake them and that’s real challenging given their size. It was one thing when user counts were in the millions or even tens or hundreds of millions but facebook has several billion users. That’s like a sizable chunk of the entire population of earth.
It would take a very novel approach to overcome those numbers and then you also have to consider momentum: at this point there are a great deal of people who consider facebook “the internet”. Like they open their browser/phone and that’s what they do. It is their habit. Then in second place you have instagram so even if you knocked facebook off meta would still ultimately be ok. And with the incubation period of social media they’d probably have another one up and coming long before your threat became viable that would have the benefit of starting in like 7th place simply because of their massive market share (see: threads). By the time your social network had the 10ish years it takes to get to hundreds of millions of users they’d potentially have that one at a billion, or have pulled the plug and moved on to another trial with a massive head start
Doesn’t mean to give up on the fediverse stuff, just that the gross corporate social media likely wont go away for a very long time, if ever. Barring outside influence like regulatory change of course
You didn’t answer the OP’s question.
