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Comment by muninn_ | Hacker News Reader

Me either. Stop using Facebook and help make sure your friends and family stop using it as well. Encourage them to not use their Facebook login for anything, and ensure that they uninstall the app from their mobile phone. Explain to them the FakeNewsBook, the not giving a crap about user privacy, how the service makes people depressed and have low self esteem, and how much of a waste of time it is.

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The problem with telling people to stop using Facebook is that they want some way to communicate with extended family and former friends.Before you can tell people to simply stop, you need a replacement. I have not yet seen a solution which would be able to replace Facebook for that purpose. Email is much clunkier and does not work to communicate with many people. IM and other messaging, including Signal, are quite different and can't be used to communicate with many people. There have been a few attempts, such as dispora, to federate Facebook but they have not caught on and may cause some problems with e.g. searchability.

When our first child was born we set up a telegram group to share photos and news. It encouraged both sides of our family to sign up. Now we all use telegram to communicate with each other rather than Facebook

How were people communicating before FB? When you have that answer, you realize how futile is to depend your whole life & friends' + family's on FB.

Let's read parent comment again it says: "communicate with extended family and former friends"

Before Facebook and its ilk, part of the definition of "former friends" and "extended family" was that they are categorized as people you rarely communicate with, or not at all.

Before Facebook, you didn't need Facebook to ignore your former friend or to rarely talk to your second cousin on the other side of the continent. Today, you still don't need Facebook for this.

Call me out if I'm reaching here, but I think if people just used Facebook to figure out what the hell their 3rd cousin's phone number is, Facebook would totally collapse. I don't think that use case has to go away in order to kill what Facebook has become or what it threatens to become.

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