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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

I uninstalled every Facebook product from my phone. Turns out I really didn't need Messenger after all.

As I still concede to using Facebook, I have decided to install a Chrome shortcut to mbasic.facebook.com. It does everything I need without tons of scripting, doesn't optimistically download content, and loads fast when my bandwidth is reduced. It never notifies me, and that's a good thing. Without infinite scrolling, I'm less likely to waste time.

Maybe I'll decide to ditch Facebook entirely, but for now, using mbasic has been a healthier alternative.

My 4g LTE bandwidth seems to last longer, too.

With HTTPS and a mobile connection, I can't see why I would need a VPN for Facebook.

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+1. If you still want to receive some basic notifications on incoming messages, FaceSlim app is very nice :)

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.indywidualni.fblite/

Uninstalled Fb app and messenger long time ago. I can't uninstall whatsapp even if i wanted to and it's hard to uninstall Instagram.

I remember uninstalling Facebook was pretty difficult. I was only able to truly get rid of it by rooting my phone(I didn't do it for that purpose, but that ended up being one benefit). They must pay Samsung a lot of money because there's no good reason why a non-critical app would be so hard to remove.

I can't uninstall whatsapp because my entire family communicates via whatsapp.

I convinced my family to move to Signal. Perhaps try that.

Conversely I found Line messenger works well. :-)

Sure, i can try to convince my immediate family. But cousins and everyone? It's too much to ask

Wouldn't merely disabling the app (in system -> applications) have accomplished the same except for freeing up a couple hundred megs of storage on the system partition? Disabled apps don't have their services run.

Yes, but I also want that space. Nothing changes the fact that it really doesn't have a right to be there. :)

Also, there were other apps that I could only disable. I think YouTube might have been one of them, and I would really prefer to use NewPipe instead. So once I was rooted it was kind of like "Well, might as well delete ALL of that crap."

I recently bought a Samsung Galaxy J7 Prime and was able to uninstall Facebook the same way that you would uninstall any other Facebook app. It's the first Samsung phone I've ever used that was like that.

That would almost make me upgrade my note 3 to another Samsung. If it wasn't for their Geo locking.

Uninstalled all Facebook apps as soon as I got my phone, a few months ago, but only recently discovered there were two remaining hidden apps that didn't show up in the normal app list: https://forum.xda-developers.com/tmobile-lg-v10/help/suspici...

Before I disabled them, one of them was running.

+1 for mbasic.facebook.com I never use the rest of the site, but there are some contacts that I can only reliably reach through messenger

I used to use it for events too, till they broke events pages in mbasic

https://github.com/ZeeRooo/MaterialFBook is a great app for anyone who finds mbasic a bit basic.

Cool! I didn't know about mbasic.facebook.com

I don't want to use Mesenger but I need to use FB to keep in touch with my family abroad. I always have to make the browser render the non-mobile site.

I've just changed my bookmark and I'm not looking back. :)

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