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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- marketplace
- messenger
Literally my only attachments to Meta at this point. I want to delete my account so badly.
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.
For marketplace there is a project in development. It’s called Flohmarkt. Not quite ready yet for primetime but worth keeping an eye on
Also owned by Meta
I’ve heard that you can keep your account but delete your Facebook Profile
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?
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.”
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.
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.
network effect
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
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.
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)
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
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 :)
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
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.
Mastodon is a huge part of the Fediverse. It allows you to control who can follow you (you can set it to prompt you to approve each new follower). You can make your posts visible to your followers only. Each post you make has a visibility option, and you can set it to followers-only by default.
Is that enforced by encryption or does it rely on federated instances to respect the visibility settings of such posts?
Yes, it relies on federation. I don’t think the data will even be sent to instances unless someone follows you on that instance.
Mastodon has a post only to followers feature, admins will be able to see those posts (because they would have to be able to if they are to send them to your followers on their instance) but other than that, it’s private.
Now mastodon isn’t a one to one replacement like friendica but it doesn’t seem like there isn’t a reason they couldn’t make a similar feature as far as I know
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.
I don’t think there’s anything in the Fediverse meant to support the family updates use case.
We use giant SMS text message threads for that.
For more privacy, we get everyone to use Signal or XMPP with OMEMO.
I have linkedin and facebook and its exculsively to just keep up contacts and I look for work on linkedin and occasionaly bitch at some corp on facebook.
I’m in a similar boat. I immigrated to Canada back in 2017, and I have a daughter now who is turning five. As of right now Facebook is the single most effortless way for me to stay in contact with my friends and family back home, and allows them to feel familiar with and/or connected to me and my daughter.
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.
Make a group chat. Also, see my recent posts.
