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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Useful hints:

- Put anything on Facebook you're willing to have on a public web page. Stop there.

- Don't use Facebook's messaging or email.

- On desktops and laptops, run Ghostery and Privacy Badger. This keeps Facebook's "like" buttons from tracking your browsing.

- Don't run Facebook's phone app. It's way too intrusive; it gives your contact list to Facebook, just for starters.

- Remember, sharing is spamming. Don't "share" links from others on Facebook. That makes you an unpaid employee of Facebook's ad engine.

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Uninstall Facebook's phone app and check out mbasic.facebook.com. It doesn't require javascript to run. You can access Messenger and everything.

I heard somewhere that version of FB was going to be depreciated at some point?

I use another browser on my phone for fb, and it's the only thing I use that browser for. This is amazing! I can finally read all of the messages I had without installing their app. Thank you so much for sharing that!!

messenger.com also works well on the desktop to chat and avoid the newsfeed.

Unfortunately it redirects to the app/play store on mobile, and has a terrible layout if you force desktop mode.

I think a good enough compromise for me is to only use the messenger and contacts, and avoid the newsfeed/posts/pages.

That's exactly what I do. I only use messenger.com and the fb messenger app. My friends warn me when there's something of interest on one of our college groups, but apart from that I don't go to the main site at all.

F-Droid has quite a few open-source wrapper apps around facebook's mobile site which improve usability and isolation.

Except only seeing 4-5 messages from an active conversation at once on the basic site is basically unusable.

> - Don't use Facebook's messaging or email.

I'd love to not use FB's messaging, especially since they recently changed the email message notifications to say "you have a message. log in to see it" instead of giving a preview of the message like it used to. However, I can't figure out a way to keep a minimal FB account and not use their messaging. Some of my friends do have the vile Messenger app on their phones and default to using FB messages for communication. I've just not been able to ignore those, as a bunch of the time it's message of the form "hey, let's do X."

My solution is:

go through every chat that you had in the last 2 years, and "mute" it.

That way you won't get the red dot notifying you about it when you log into Facebook, and you can blissfully ignore any message there. You might still want to check messages there every once in a while (every couple of weeks, maybe)

If you have other contacts (advertised on your Facebook about page, even!) and you let your friends know to avoid contacting you on Facebook, I think they shouldn't expect you to be alert and quick to reply to their messages on such a platform

here's an easier protip: use uBlock Origin, and completely hide the right-hand column.

Presumably you mean uMatrix?

No. I'm talking about uBlock Origin, which has a tool (see the button with the little eyedrop icon) which you can use to click on elements of the screen to hide them and save that as a rule. I think this is a bit simpler than uMatrix's UI.

Oh sorry, I completely misunderstood.

I didn't realise you meant visual column - I thought you meant 'use X and in it disable everything in the right-hand column'; since uBlock Origin doesn't have a columnar UI, I assumed you meant uMatrix. :)

Your parent's explicit usecase is "sometimes people make ad-hoc plans with me through messenger", and ignoring those for weeks on end sort of defeats the purpose and encourages those folks to not make plans with them...

That is the issue. I'd be more willing to try training my friends to contact me through other means except that, having recently moved to a new city where I knew no one, none of the people I currently spend time with IRL actually have much invested yet in being my friend, so tossing up hurdles seems unwise.

That's about what I did for a while. Then realized Twitter is a better fit for public posts. Now, I visit Facebook in an incognito window only when my mom tells me to check out something.

Something more on the last point, it _was_ even worse in my situation. A friend(?) is a blogger who embedded ads on more than 50% of his posts. He's like a moving billboard, and I was forced to be an unpaid employee of whoever because I might end up buying something I don't need initially. He possibly post 30% of things that useful, so I can't filter this, all I can do is: 1) block him, 2) Unavoidably read 50% of crap.

I have removed my account for more than a year though, NVM now :/

Aside from having various ad blockers (also Privoxy and a modified hosts file), I never open Facebook except in a private window.

Yes, I love tuning my /etc/hosts as well. In case anyone is curious: https://pastebin.com/raw/4cUS8r8W

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