How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos
ronaldlangeveld.com
ronaldlangeveld.com
With the continued leaks and breaches on Facebook, I’d like to do what the author does here. I do want to download the information, but then I’d like to delete my account.
I still wish there was some kind of social media platform like Facebook from 2008, but it’s not that big of a deal. I’m glad I don’t get stressed by some app on my phone all the time. People who want to talk to me email or text now.
I think social media could work. But until then, consider letting go of the existing platforms are stressing you out. We do just fine without sharing our day with the internet, as long as we have good people in our lives.
I still use Insta and WhatsApp tho’ so I am not entirely free but FB is the biggest time sink for sure.
I'm trying to win my friends over to use Telegram instead. It's miles ahead of Whatsapp in my opinion.
Probably this. It makes sense considering all the other stuff they have done.
Surely it is nothing more than "Delete facebook account"?
That's what I did two years ago. No fanfare, just "Delete facebook account". A number of friends have since asked "Have you quit facebook?" "Yes" but that's been about the only repercussion.
I really expect the next generation (I guess, kids born in the last 8 years) to launch a major backlash against over-sharing and pretty go back to the roots of relationships: exactly how you said it.
I do think that for young people, "the people who is around" will not be necessarily people near in the physical world. Teenagers mainly communicate through chat groups, and work trends don't seem to go towards encouraging more physical presence.
Thus a reaction against current social networks would take the form of using more private, ephemeral channels (think Snapchat), and reduced, more controlled usage of public-facing ones (Tweeter, Facebook, Instagram).
Even if it's just shared with "Friends", most people will Facebook-friend a much wider range of people than who they would consider friends in real life. It's not just the close friends and family members who, a couple decades back, might have got a chance to thumb through the family photo album. It's also often your co-workers, friends-of-friends, and that person you got drunk with in a hotel bar 6 years ago and sporadically chatted up on Facebook Messenger for a few months after that.
Even if nothing practical comes of it, I wouldn't at all blame kids who grew up in the Facebook era for being pissed about it. The harm isn't in what people who are seeing it are doing, the harm is the over-sharing itself.
I think best case is there will be a generation whose only “online presence” are the stuff about them from ages 0-10 that their social media obsessed parents posted before the kid could acquire any agency in their own online life.
For a parent, making choices on your child’s behalf is kinda part of the deal.
And this person has made the decision for their child that whatever social media company is not going to own their child's image. What is is "bizarre" about that.
I hardly think caring for a child and letting a corporation own their image are even remotely the same thing.
If she had said this I see no logical discrepancy, but to couch your logic in terms of a child’s lack of consent is the point that makes little sense.
And pretty much everyone I talk to about this mentions that they do those status updates and photos for family members more than friends, and that they keep up with friends differently.
In fact, I keep up with all of my friends through direct messages on one platform or another or IRL.
The only exception is Twitter because I feel like you can get into interesting conversations on there...I just wouldn't get on there to share stuff with friends from IRL.
It's also not something most people are going to find out about, because, yeah, probably more-or-less impossible to monetize, and therefore ain't gonna be advertised.
I've also been involved in some experimentation with private Slack groups, but I can't say it's a great option. For people who don't want to be checking their smartphone constantly, it feels like this wild uncontrollable deluge of communication. And people who don't want to install an app on their smartphone quickly stop bothering to go to the website, either.
I have 3 separate group chats I share stuff with: 1. Family 2. friends from uni and 3. colleagues from old work.
It’s still the case in a handful of markets (China etc).
Communities were for favorite quotes, singers, feelings, persons, subjects etc.
After a fair bit of experimentation it seems that deleting Twitter, and blocking Reddit, have been the two things that have most improved my mental state.
Just a guess but I feel like the combination of endlessness (you can literally just scroll/browse forever) and that sort of trademark internet sarcasm, cliche, meme, pithy style of communication, just left me in a perpetually bad mood.
Interesting observation. I hadn't really thought of it before, but, now that you mention it, I do feel like Twitter is somewhat set up to be a game of seeing who can be the most misanthropic. Sardonic and sarcastic humor are the kinds that are best suited to such a short form.
I suppose it's theoretically only a performance people are doing for fun. But, if you're doing it all the time. . . well, practice makes perfect.
to the point of younger generations not wanting it: my 14 year old son refuses a phone, and has declared he'll never have a social media account. not sure if that's likely to last forever, but whatever social is these days .. he's highly averse.
If you do this, change your profile pic/cover photo to a text-image saying something like "No longer using Facebook" in letters big enough to be read in the thumbnail views. It'll help build social momentum around disconnecting from Facebook, and it will let your Facebook connections know it's not a good medium to communicate with you.
How?
I became member of all sorts of group: Buy-N-Sell in my local area, technology groups, 10+ DevOps groups and so on. The quality of posts on these is poor and is irrelevant for me for the most part. So every time I used to open the app out of habit, I would see all non-personal crappy posts and I would close the app in under 10 seconds. Over time my mind hated using FB and clicking on that app went away from my muscle memory without me trying to force any habit changes.
Why not just delete the account? FB is still great to find old friends, ex-colleagues who I might have lost contact with. I also use it as my public mic to post stuff that I want to share as widely as I can.
It's fun to take on the PMs who design addictive products that influence us at psychological level and beat them at their own game. Bring it on!
I did the same thing, but using a different technique.
Steps:
1) Taper off - Unfollow everyone who isn't a close friend or family
2) Destroy feed - Unfollow everyone
x) Optional step - Delete all your posts and untag all photos. It took me an hour or two but I deleted everything, one by one. A greasemonkey script managed to clear some of it, but the rest I did by hand.
I still keep my account, just with nothing on it.
A while back, I did a big clean up of all my groups, likes and (most of my) friends, which greatly improved the signal to noise. Before that, I hardly ever checked FB because there just wasn't anything I really cared about, and if there was it was too well buried.
Now, though I find myself checking it, just in case there is something worth seeing. I particularly started doing this after happening on two big surprise stories on there from small businesses that made me think "Lucky I was scrolling through FB, otherwise I wouldn't have known about that".
The signal to noise is better, but the problem remains the signal isn't worth receiving most of the time.
In my circles I always openly say "I'd love to, but I don't use Facebook" - so if someone wants to have me included, they need to think about a more democratic way to include others. It's not egoistic - many other people don't use FB either. Excluding them just because a group of people is too blind to notice is a very negative approach.
This is the problem, I'd be literally the only one. I tried it once - of course they didn't exclude me, but a lot of info got to me too late (when I had other plans already) and smaller events not at all.
It's called network effect and works by majority.
If most of your peers keeps using $foo you can only choose between using it or being left out - both are options that one dislikes.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
I would bet that at the end of the experiment you can count your list with one hand or less.
FB has made billions instilling this FOMO into their users’ heads. It’s fake.
What has been told in Snapchat's leaked memo really resonates to me despite me not using Snapchat - Facebook has become to impersonal to me. I have too many friends, most of them I don't want to loose, because they are family, old friend, (former) coworkers, etc. but that also mean that I use facebook as an address book more than anything else. I don't browse it and I don't post on it.
Scrolled down just now and saw one post of someone running a 10k, a complaint about not having a holiday on Monday (haha), an ad from Triplebyte, a photo of the SpaceX rocket launch visible from the city, pictures from Yosemite, a birthday, an ad for Fairy, and a friend cosplaying.
Not so bad. I'm fine with that.
The hardest part for me was unfollowing close friends who post a lot of garbage and videos. Before I complained about FB being shit content, but it was really some friends posting shit content.
I think in combination unfriending and unfollowing lots of people, and facebook's algorithm updates, it has become more useful and fun to use again.
Good for a laugh, but it's pretty easy to get rid of that stuff in particular. Anytime anyone reshares something, I go to the 3-dot menu and select "Hide all from xxxxx".
It makes most of the crap go away... except for the one "friend" who somehow manages to reshare everything under the sun. Somehow that guy keeps finding new sources for me to "Hide all" from. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It is by no means a solution, but the signal-to-noise ratio is increased.
You have to spend half an hour clicking through your list of "friends" (or fans or whatever these relationships are called these days) or write fifteen lines of javascript to click on the dom elements, but then that's it. Clean wall. Silence.
Unfortunately this didn't always solve the problem. For one thing, it would still show those pages when someone interacted with those posts on say, someone else's profile who shared it.
Even then, there are thousands of new junk pages created for that garbage every day. It's nearly impossible to keep up with it. Though I unfollowed or unfriended those who were the worst offenders, there would be others who took their place.
Facebook is what you make of it. It offers relatively granular control over who you want to see so if even you must be friends with someone, you can still unfollow them.
Surely the default is a bit annoying, especially when joining groups, but those can be unfollowed too.
The only thing I can complain about is “your friend reacted to or commented on some post” I don’t care about. That’s Facebook’s fault but your friends are your fault. Most of the time I add friends and promptly unfollow them because they share memes.
Recent events have demonstrated that the privacy controls are not what people think they are. Cambridge Analytica was able to access data belonging to the friends of people who granted certain permissions, and there was a recent data breach caused by a bug in an impersonation feature. Advertisers are able to see quite a lot of information too.
To me, he's saying "if you have 1500 friends, use Facebook's follow/unfollow feature to improve your S/N ratio while still being friends with those people." That is, rather than privacy (controlling outgoing information), he's discussing the ability to filter incoming information.
""" Problem with the facebook exporter are:
- All comments are missing. Even the ones you wrote yourself!
- There are no images in the timeline.
- The number of likes and shares is missing on the posts.
Before I delete my account, I wanted to have a more decent backup of my timeline. I looked into printing out the timeline, exporting it as pdf, full-page screenshots, massaging the DOM/HTML. I could get none of this working, with acceptable effort.
Eventually I went throught the whole timeline (100s of posts!) and screenshotted each one individually. To make this process a little less tedious I changed the OSX keyboard shortcut for full page scrrenshot to F1, so I could use the following combo:
[...] """
So, saying "I only use Facebook to communicate" and expecting others to conform is a bit more naturally presumptuous than choosing to leave Facebook - and it's a fair point that if a relationship can't survive not using a specific proprietary tool, then maybe it wasn't that strong of a relationship.
I reactivated it and have a policy of only checking it 2-3 times a week. I dont have either apps on my phone.
My profile is tidied up and has contact information that my friends can use to reach out to me (hardly anyone has).
Reddit is the next thing I am contemplating my usage. It sucks up way too much time for the reward of fake internet points.
After Google killed Reader, i found myself using Reddit and HN far more than i had previously, as these are good aggregators of stuff i find interesting.
I would agree if Reddit were only the inane collection of memes and squabbles that many people assume it is from a cursory glance. The problem is that Reddit subreddits are replacing many independent forums for various hobbies and interests. Message board websites are often dying, they might only have a handful of posts each month or year while the relevant subreddit has informative or useful content several times a week. Reddit is often criticized as a toxic environment, but a dying forum website where only a few cantankerous old grouches are left can feel even more toxic.
http://www.jaruzel.com/blog/how-i-erased-5000-facebook-comme...
I don't really want to delete it as it's how I stay in touch with friends and family. It's how most of my friends organize events. Messenger (not the FB app) is the #1 way friends communicate with me and each other as well.
I did do a few things though. I aggressively unfollowed people. Anyone I only met a few times. Friends I haven't seen in years or don't expect to see. Anyone who posts too much (except my sister who I feel I can't unfollow). Friends who post too much political stuff. I click "this ad offends me on every ad". I use FB Purity on the desktop web site with about 10 filters to filter out a bunch of crap like "was mentioned in a post" or "replied to a comment", "shared her post", "shared his post", "is with" and other attention spam.
Not that much shows up but I'm still able to keep up with a few really close friends and family and still participate in event organizing etc and not feel I'm being spammed too much. I don;'t have FB Purity on my phone but I guess I don't use the app all that much on the phone. I mostly use Messenger for messages and the FB app to look at profiles (linked from Messenger) and to read/post in shared event pages.
Of course maybe you want to delete FB because of leaks or you just don't want to be tracked which are really good reasons to get off. All I'm trying to say is I don't recognize many of the other complaints in my own experiences with FB so maybe others might find those solutions useful?
Deactivated (not deleted) my account a couple weeks ago. Guess what? Life goes on. Nothing happened. I am still in the loop and I spare a couple minutes per day. Gained a bit more freedom, at least it does feel like it.
Which just shows photos videos and comments/posts.
Ditched the shares, likes, and all the other crap. And was just a place where we can keep in touch with people. And leave it at that.
IMO 'Facebook' should be a /dumb/ social network, dumb in the sense that it's features are basic, once built it doesn't need a billion features added to it.
The good thing about email is: * Everybody has it, * It's decentralized, we don't need to all agree on one company, * There's a lot of clients for reading it already, and everybody can choose their favourite, * If I own my domain, I can change providers transparently, * etc.
But thinking about this, what if (assuming this was an open source social network) there was a data source hook. For example:
When I create my account, I could say "Get my data from X, and send my data to Y". Where I can expose an API on... AWS Api Gateway. Then when you visit my feed/wall, it pulls the data from that source. The only thing the social network stores is the API, and any Auth criteria. Then (Say I owned "Dumb Social Network") I don't own your data, you do, I just provide a place to display it.
If you don't want to use your own source for data then I can store it for you, but I may limit what I store to protect myself as a company (like GDPR)
This is not necessarily the case. For a considerable portion of humanity getting online these days, social networks are the internet for them and they might not use email at all. Even in places where email is a thing, many young people these days don’t have email unless and until they go to university.
I also wonder if the age of The Social Network is over. If a new better Facebook did come along, people wouldn't join it because deep down they all know that social networking is massive waste of time and will always end up being an endless stream of garbage. The only reason they've not all left Facebook yet, is fear of missing out.
Pden is a decentralized microblogging app
What does that mean exactly? Without any screen-shots or detailed information I'm none the wiser as to why I should try your service. I'm certainly not handing over my email address without more information. Just a bit of UI feedback there.
There seems to be a belief that holding someone in your list of contacts is equivalent to being their friend. You're not. You're an entry in a really small Rolodex. If you haven't actually personally spoken with them in a few months, you are dusty card in that Rolodex. Burn the pile and let those relationships that matter emerge from the ash.
It's this reason that I haven't nuked it entirely yet. I also use Messenger on occasion to communicate with those I haven't spoken to in a long time. I'm ready to make that leap soon. And no, not all of those folks whose numbers or email addresses I lack are not 'friends' necessarily - I have a few former colleagues and bosses on there as well I like to chat with on occasion.
The only thing I find useful on Facebook that I can't find reliably anywhere else is a comprehensive listing of local events and concerts (as well as invites to things my friends host). If there were a separate site that could aggregate and organize events content as nicely and completely as FB does I would have deleted my account outright a while ago.
I've cut out all the services from my life that siphons my "metadata", and while my daily Facebook usage was around 15 minutes/day, i still can't completely delete it. Instead i've banned the Facebook app from my phone/tablet and only check facebook when i'm at home during the evenings, and even then i use Firefox with Facebook Container.
As for (Facebook) messenger, i'm trying hard to teach people that i don't use it, or telegram, and instead they can reach me on Signal, or just plain old iMessages/SMS. It takes a few weeks, but usually people "get it" when i don't reply to their messages.
Now I'm trying to delete it and I can't find the link to "Your Facebook Information" no matter where I look. This is where the delete option is according to Facebook's help section.
Anyone having the same problem or is Facebook deliberately burying that link?
As for my friend list.. well.. It's all in Json format..
So now you can essentially use the power of your brain to think how your friend looked.
If you can't, well then you probably weren't friends anyway. Sorry.
Join another social network, add a bunch of people that you barely know, wah lah facebook friends replaced
>how to stay connected
Letters, phone calls, texts, meet in person, etc. How many friends do you have that you don't ever see or interact with besides on facebook, and what percentage of that group are actual friends that you would hangout with in person?
There is/was a Facebook Group app, where its just the groups
From a socio economic point of view. It's actually terribly when I think of it today. But that's just how it were growing up.
Want to see someone getting killed by police and watch your friends quickly get baited by Russians to form to actual American protests related to their preconceived notions?
No? Well its already playing enjoy! but be careful where you tap because IF YOU LIKE ANYTHING you'll lose half of your friends in real life but thats okay because we were only going to show you more of this exact thing regardless"
Yeah, that's a good sign that you need smarter friends.
Autoplay is cancer, though.
We've reconnected through work/vacation travels and been ecstatic about having local tour guides. For these connections, facebook has been my only lifeline as the commonality between us.
Yet, people are more worried about Facebook! Amazing!!!
But you should not bother. Go worry about the useless photos that you first upload to facebook and then wonder what a for profit company is going to do with all that data.
So it may not be that reflective of user sentiment. Very disappointing to see though.
I would argue Facebook is making the problem worse by making it very easy spread misinformation.