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Comment by itsspring | Hacker News Reader

My thoughts exactly. I’ve blocked Facebook in my DNS hosts file & thankfully Firefox has a Facebook fence to isolate their trackers.

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Out of curiosity, has doing this disrupted your web browsing experience in any way? I'd like to do this but I'm kind of afraid of alienating 75% of the web that relies on the FB JS SDK for something (I'm not really sure if this is the case, but it might be?)

EDIT: thanks for the responses. Will block at DNS :)

By "disrupt", do you mean "improves immensely"? It depends on how much FOMO you suffer from. For instance, the folks that I used to do music jams with (picture middle-aged folk playing bluegrass) have moved to FB Live(?) for some things. I don't see those, nor participate. That's okay, we do our own non-proprietary chat once a week in lieu of live jammin'. Local animal shelter posts stuff on FB, most of which I can live without.

Does shit break because something, something FB SDK? Nope, at least not shit I care about, and not FB.

But for the most part, I get to mostly forget that FB even exists.

Indeed. What's the point of having values if you're not willing to be burdened with some costs?

Since FB lacks strong values it gets imposed on the wider community, but such is life. The only true option is using or building alternatives. Trying to chain the monster, where every individual positive attributes always has to be controlled and directed from some other central body, whom we then also have to trust with even more power, sounds like a losing game to me.

Not using FB isn't that difficult anyway. There's plenty of group messaging apps that achieve much of the same.

Are you replying to me, or just hijacking to make a general point? Because FB gets blocked at DNS at my house, I could have saved you some typing on "values".

One friend of mine was visiting and noticed the same thing on my wifi. We got into debate where he argued to be freedom loving individual and I being in support of censorship. Now okay, I backed down with my "censorship" but unfortunately to quote RMS it ended up being "negative in the freedom dimension". Kinda regret it now that I was kind enough to give wifi access.

I was commenting in support of not using FB, which is supporting what you're saying...

Gotcha, thanks for the clarification (and the stealth edit ;-). I'd delete my original question if it wouldn't leave your comment dangling.

Thanks, this sounds great to me.

The only problems I could see is that some services that ONLY auth via Facebook will not work.

Having stated that, consider if you eliminate Facebook from your life and have issues on the web, and the answer to those issues is not "create a Facebook account" then it should be relatively safe to remove Facebook from your life.

Yep, I've already deleted my FB account since like 2014 but I know that a lot of sites load their SDK in order to track still. Thanks.

no problems blocking FB JS.

You could remove the DNS block and only block it from loading from 3rd party sites using the built-in Firefox support or a suitable WebExtension (and also block it in non-browser apps if desired by setting up a MITM proxy with a certificate only trusted by the browser and user agent filtering).

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