Ask HN: Where to go after deleting Facebook? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where to go after deleting Facebook?

54 pointssir_brickalot74 comments

Facebook for me is mainly a self updating address book. So is there any other recommended service that could possibly even import all or some of my FB data and is able to help keep in touch with my acquantances?

View on HN

Call a good friend for a coffee face to face.

I quit Facebook months ago, and guess what, no one cared. I keep contact with REAL friends far away via email or Whatsapp. For local friends I use Whatsapp and meet in person. There is no NEED for a true Facebook replacement.

But to be honest, I created a new account, with a fake name and won't add anyone to it. The goal is to track some events and key communities I like to interact with. But I've added no personal data to this account and only log on to it on a less used web browser and don't use it in my mobile. I also use the following add-ons to prevent any Facebook tracking: uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger and uMatrix. Probably overkilling it.

  WhatsApp

You know that's still Facebook, rrriiiight?

The data may ultimately belong to Facebook but Whatsapp is not the same as Facebook.

But everything is made by Facebook, the only difference is branding. It's like saying that Facebook Messenger only belongs to Facebook but isn't Facebook.

True, but it does have end-to-end encryption so their ability to leak or abuse your data is a lot more limited.

I doubt they'd need the word "coffee" to infer what's happening when said message gets sent. Who sends it and to whom would be just enough thank you very much...

But they get all your location data. They'll know that you met for coffee.

Is it necessary to give them location data to use the app?

They'll know through your IP.

they will know that this IP sent this much data to that IP but not what was inside it.

Your ISP knows the same when using a web site via HTTPS. They can see you send a request to the website but not what it contained.

You could also use a VPn or TOR if you want to hide your IP.

And they'll know who you contacted and when. That allows for a lot of things to be guessed. Especially with hundreds of thousands of messages per user available to them.

Yeah, but my ISP has to follow the local laws and I can easily switch ISPs if I dislike my current one. Try that with Facebook.

Yeah, I might use a VPN but I'd also have to force all my contacts to use one as well.

As said by others, there are differences. Also, I set Whatsapp to never receive my location data.

But yeah, the networking effect is real. Whatsapp is what everyone uses, so far it seems like a decent compromise based on end-to-end encryption.

I have many friends from Egypt, China, Brazil and other places but I live in Germany. If I visit Egypt in 2 years for some reason I want to shoot a message to my friends there to meet them for "a coffee face to face". There is no better service then facebook to enable this.

Email, text, phone call, all better messaging services than Facebook.

This has been discussed before; "better" != "only".

If the target is to have a contact, an email or a phone number are sufficient.

Also, it's fallacious to think that emails/phones are subject to change, while a Facebook account isn't - some people close it. Especially emails nowadays are used for a lot of services, so people stick with them for a long time, more than the past.

As has been said before: e-mail. I moved to Canada from Spain but go back from time to time, on holidays. Every time I go, I pick up the list of people I want to see and send them an e-mail. Has worked every single time.

While I am not a fan of Facebook myself for the all reasons recently talked about and the addicting nature of it, yes the self updating address book part is nice. Here's what I did: I got a Chrome extention[1] that unfollows all my friends. I've also unliked every Facebook Page that I used to like. This means my feed is now totally empty. When I login from anywhere there is nothing in my feed. Also I rarely ever get notifications, except when someone adds me as a friend. This way the feed is gone, there's nothing to be addicted to (feed was my main addiction), its very hard to get back because it involves re-following 100s of people which my lazy mind won't do and Facebook doesn't make any money off me (no feed, no ads). So I still get to use it as a address book.

You cited the extension but did not link it. I'm interested in it. Could you provide the link?

https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-unfollow-everyone-on-Facebook...

I've used the script provided by the top answer here before and it worked! No need for an extension (I don't know if it still works however).

> [I unfollowed all my friends] [...] I still get to use it as a address book.

I'm not understanding something here. Is that an empty address book, or does FB allow you to still access the information of people you're no longer connected to? I was under the impression that the default information visible to folks not on your "Friends" list was pretty limited, which is why [Cambridge Analytica/Kogan] needed to use an app to scrape data from users' friends.

> or does FB allow you to still access the information of people you're no longer connected to

Unfollowing removes someone's posts from your wall but they remain connected as friends. (You can also like a page and unfollow it)

With this, you remain friends with them, you're just not "following" them in the RSS sense - it destroys the news feed.

unfollow != unfriend :)

No where! You go back to a normal life where you just live it instead of reading about other people living theirs.

Google! I joke, I joke.

Just send them all an email or a last FB message with your contact information. Seriously... you are not that important for 90% of the people in your FB contacts to care about. Go outside and get some fresh air and enjoy life. the people who you really matter to will either email or call you.

Read the OP, people. OP clearly said "Facebook for me is mainly a self updating address book", that's what they need a replacement for.

OP here: "Call a good friend for a coffee face to face." "Go outside and get some fresh air and enjoy life. "

This kind of advice came up repeatedly but it doesn't answer the initial question at all.

I'm fairly new to active HN but I followed passively and had the impression, that we are supposed to interact with reason and logic. These were emotional responses which triggers an emotional answer because it implies OP would be anti-social and the question would be unnecessary at best.

I am not a FB addict. I don't use the apps I hardly use the timeline, I scroll around when I'm really really bored (and that didn't help, ever), but my hoarder soul feels relieved to know that my past encounters with people from all over the world are listed somewhere and even when phone numbers changed due to country hopping or emails changed due to finishing university I'm still able to say hello when I feel like it or need a place to crash.

Maybe this context helps to stop the lecturing bullshit.

A potentially messy way to use that zip file is to find the page with your contact info in a big HTML table. You can copy and paste that table from a web browser into a spreadsheet program, edit the data into a useful format, and then export it as CSV. The CSV file can be imported into a local or online mail app.

Outlook.com used to have a feature that would import your Facebook contacts directly. I can't find that feature in the current version of the site though. Yahoo.com still does have one. So you could make an account there, import your FB contacts, then export them as a CSV file.

Scuttlebutt, a decentralized social network protocol. Currently a small niche community that is reminiscent of early internet communities.

http://scuttlebutt.nz/

Since it is a protocol, there are several clients that behave differently and you can create your own. ( https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/ )

I have deleted facebook years ago and didn't really need a replacement, it was just never useful to me. WhatsApp: This is tougher since everyone is expected to have an account there. I really like Threema as alternative, it has most of the features of WhatsApp (video chat is currently missing) and is self-financed, so being bought by some evil company is not a risk (unlike Signal). Instagram: That's where I don't have a real good alternative.

Hey this is off-topic, but since you recently dumped your FB data, could you see if this kind of thing is in there? https://twitter.com/dylanmckaynz/status/976368845635035138

I can't find a call history in my data. But I never used FB for calls. I never installed the FB apps on the phone.

Mastodon? It is decentralized. So, you can create your own instance and get everyone you know added to that instance.

Or you could find a node that's run by someone you trust, or at least trust more than FB.

As I still want to use FB (I use it for following bands I like to know when they make new music or where they play their next show), but am concerned by all those privacy issues, I use a Firefox extension by Mozilla :

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

You can then use a container system. I've got one for all the google stuff (might be worse than FB on the privacy concern in my opinion), one for Facebook, one for some online site I don't want to cross data with anything else.

That plus uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, etc...

Well, if you mostly use it as an address book of sorts, you can use something like Sync.ME and pull data from LinkedIn or Twitter instead. You'll get (somewhat) updated information if you're connected with them directly and whatever public information they reveal about themselves if not (same as Facebook). It even syncs contact photos!

This is what I do, except I also use Facebook as an information source, since people post their "fun" contact photos through there.

If its a self updating address book, then LinkedIn would essentially serve your purposes, but one could argue that LinkedIn has the same problems that Facebook does.

Strava became my FB substitute, oddly enough. It's the only social network I really like and wish I could spend more time on.

Whatever happened to Path ? This was supposed to be a "private" version of Facebook that you had more control over.

Why not build it rather than "going to it"?

https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wi...

YOU are the next Zuck.

Slack and discord for daily talks with friends. Everyone else I email, call, or sms. I haven't had facebook for a few years and haven't had an issue with keeping in contact with anyone.

I want an encrypted chat service thats convenient as slack and discord.

Surely the power of Facebook is in how the data they have on you can be used to influence you. That is, it's about what you are fed. You just need to be a conscientious consumer.

I use email and text message to keep in touch now. Or Telegram (funny how that has double meaning).

There is nothing I hate more then writing on my phone. In general I much prefer meeting someone face to face, but at least on my pc my keyboard it is much easier and faster to write a message.

There are apps that let you send SMSs from your PC. Telegram also has a desktop version.

Most messengers offer a desktop client.

Go outside!

Freenode's nice!

I wanted to remove facebook, but i can't I will lose connections to friends I met outside my home country. Its kind of the internal person-service that i can't live without currently.

Can't you ask them for alternative contacts?

You can always send them a message asking for their email addresses or phone numbers before deleting your account.

That's too inconvenient. The nice part about facebook is that you can forget about people, but then they post a status update that they are currently somewhere in your country and you can meet them.

I imported all of my Facebook contacts into https://www.monicahq.com/, which delightfully enough, I found during a Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295

Did you manually import them all? What was your process?

The ol copy paste while binge watching a Netflix series on the couch method.

Agreed, and if I used an alternative I would have to spend hours searching on google, trying to import "iContacts" or whatever format into whatever other format when I change my pc, phone, loose all the data, or whatever might happen.

Its like downloading your email and organizing it into sub folders instead of using gmail.

Yes I just use the messenger app for this reason. I haven't opened the actual FB app on my phone for ages.

HN of course.

For a walk.

Outside.

outside

Instagram

Instagram is still Facebook!

Really!!!! I will use WhatsApp then

>>>Instagram

>>Instagram is still Facebook!

>Really!!!! I will use WhatsApp then

While the whoosh and snark are amusing, they may not work out well for any involved....

Supreme Court ruled that illegal and if you do that, it is punishable by law as hacking!

I don't live in the US so I am not familiar with this ruling, but are you saying that I am not allowed to use my own data that Facebook handed over to me in a neat zip file containing html files, photos, friends lists, messages... everything?

You surely are in your right to get your data, I guess there has been a misunderstanding, he was mentioning data about your contact.

European GDPR is making this data export a consumer right (it comes applicable in may). Though I haven't heard about any service enabling data loading from a Facebook export (nor a Facebook export tool).

It is illegal to export your data from facebook by 3rd party even if you authorities it.

Google Facebook vs power ventures or https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/12/09/504999255/epis...

There is a reason for most of the monopolies, Government.

Well, you could try: https://kuende.com - still not mature as a product, but not far from it

I'm part of the team, we are running a token sale somewhere around the next couple of months (https://ico.kuende.com <- easier to understand the vision from here) and planning a "paradigm shift" of social media, so to speak.

I guess, given the current drivers within traditional social media and all the associated bull*t, we might have a shot at fulfilling our vision.

It looks and feels like Instagram. Is it decentralized running on Ethereum?

Part of it is decentralized, the challenges module. Planning to move further on decentralizing more and more of the product (during the past 3 years we developed it in a centralized manner), but its not that practical now, given the fact that we need storage, tons of micro-transactions with 0 fees for the end user.

So, yes, using Ethereum blockchain, not fully decentralzied, and we might switch to a dPOS blockchain in the near future (if EOS, SMT succeed).

lol @ the ico, why would a centralized company require a blockchain?

Indeed, that would be hilarious. What we are working on is a semi-decentralized product, with a core part (that of challenges) being on blockchain and two tokens governing the ecosystem (details about the mechanics are in the whitepaper and on the ico site)

Users can create, curate and participate in challenges. And they are incentivized to do so through gamification. For all that, they can earn tokens and keep the fun running.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com